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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Starship Raises $25 Million to Roll Out More Delivery Robots

Starship Technologies, makers of squat, autonomous wheeled delivery robots, announced yesterday that the company has raised $25 million in additional “seed” funding. The round includes follow-on investments from existing backers including Matrix Partners and Morpheus Ventures. This brings the total amount the company has raised to $42.2 million. The company also announced it has brought on Lex Bayer, a former Airbnb exec as Starship’s new CEO.

Starship’s rolling robots can be used to deliver items like packages, restaurant food or groceries within an hour. They are currently in pilot programs in Redwood City, CA and Washington DC, and according to press materials, Starship robots have covered 100,000 miles in 20 countries and 100 cities around the world.

Starship, which also counts Daimler Benz as an investor, said the new money will help scale its business. Earlier this year, the company announced that it would deploy 1,000 delivery robots to corporate and academic campuses across the U.S. and Europe by the end of the year.

The robot delivery space is certainly heating up. In addition to Starship, Marble has its own fleet of delivery robots, and counts DoorDash as a partner. DoorDash may also be working on its own robots as part of its own moonshot initiatives program. Kiwi robots are rolling around UC Berkeley’s campus delivering food. And over in China, Alibaba just unveiled its own driverless delivery robot, the G Plus.

But the biggest hurdle for Starship isn’t the competition, it’s state and local laws. While states like Virginia and Wisconsin have passed laws permitting robot deliveries, San Franciso has tightened restrictions on how they can be used. That’s one reason why Starship’s rollout on campuses is a smart decision. It can work out and improve its technology on private property, sidestepping those municipal hurdles.

If you’re intrigued by robots and want to learn more about how they are impacting the food industry, be sure to check out our podcast, The Automat, which hosts entertaining and informative conversations about tomorrow’s food-related robots and artificial intelligence today.

DoorDash Hiring for new “Moonshot Initiatives” Like Drones and Robots

When DoorDash closed its $535 million Series D round in March, we wondered if that meant more robot delivery vehicles were on the way. Based on a job listing by the company, it looks like we will, and possibly some drones and self-driving cars too boot.

The job listing is for a Software Engineer, Special Projects. And according to the posting they are “forming a new team at DoorDash dedicated to tackling big bets and moonshot initiatives. Think self driving cars, robotics, drones, chatbots, etc.”

The company is “looking for entrepreneurs to join the founding team,” and the role reports directly to the Co-founder (doesn’t say which one). It goes on to say that the person hired will “Build the 10x ideas from the ground up e.g. robotics, drones, next-gen dispatch, ML-chatbots, strategic partnerships, etc.”

DoorDash has already used robots from Marble for delivery in certain San Francisco neighborhoods. Moving some of that R&D in-house could mean the company is looking to build its own, customized version of one.

The listing doesn’t have a posted date, so we don’t know exactly how long they’ve been searching for such a role. We reached out to DoorDash for a comment, but didn’t hear back in time for publication. We will update this post when we hear back from the company.

A little less than a month ago, DoorDash expanded beyond restaurant delivery and into groceries with a partnership with Walmart in Atlanta. DoorDash is basically powering the logistics and delivery as more of a while label for Walmart in that instance. With 10 percent of U.S. consumers now regularly buying groceries online, getting into that category is a big opportunity. But it also brings bigger competitors, namely Amazon, which is a master of logistics and delivery. DoorDash will need to be innovative as it looks to possibly take on Bezos and company.

DoorDash COO Christopher Payne will be speaking at our Smart Kitchen Summit in October. Hopefully he’ll bring robot or drone or a robot piloting a drone with him.

Chipotle and DoorDash Join Forces for Delivery Service

Chipotle just announced a partnership with DoorDash, through which it will bring delivery services to 1,500 of its locations 2,441 locations.

The move is Chipotle’s largest delivery effort to date. It comes on the heels of CEO Brian Niccol (formerly of Taco Bell) joining the company, and after a rocky few years that included such gems as e. coli and norovirus outbreaks, lawsuits, and a 95 percent drop in profits.

It might seem weird that a brand concerned with food integrity as well as bouncing back from a couple health scares would enlist the help of someone from one of America’s least-healthy chains. But Niccol, who succeeded founder Steve Ells at the beginning of March, is credited with turning the Taco Bell image around through menu and marketing innovations, and ultimately making it more appealing.

He’s aiming to replicate that success at Chipotle. Offering delivery should certainly help, since over half of millennials rate convenience as a top driver when buying food, and it doesn’t get more convenient than having quick-service grub delivered to your home or office.

Delivery, anyway, is increasingly becoming one of the most important aspects of a food-service business. The food delivery market is expected to hit $76 billion in 2022, and many consider delivery services a “must-have” rather than “nice to have” for restaurants of all types.

DoorDash has similar partnerships with Dunkin’ Donuts, Wendy’s, and Jack in the Box, among many others. This latest pairing follows DoorDash’s announcement in March that the company has raised $355 million in Series D financing and plans to “triple [its] geographic footprint from 600 to 1,600 cities.” DoorDash’s system integrates directly with restaurants’ POS systems, which creates inherently speedier service.

To celebrate the DoorDash-Chipotle launch, the two will offer free delivery on orders of $10 and up placed via the DoorDash app, effective now through May 6, which means you can celebrate Cinco de Mayo by ordering tons of fake Mexican food by using the code “GETCHIPOTLE.”

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu will join TheSpoon’s Smart Kitchen Summit in Europe on June 11 and 12. Head over to Dublin to see him and other leaders in the food business space.

Food Tech News Roundup: GM Hops, Food Delivery Mergers & Meat MRI’s

Happy weekend. This was a big week for food tech news, with funding updates from Instacart and Impossible Foods, and big partnership announcements from Innit/Chef’d and Kenwood/Drop. But there were also a bunch of smaller stories that caught our eye, even if we didn’t have time to write a post about them. So we rounded them up in one place for you! Put an egg on something and eat it while skimming through our roundup of this week’s food tech news stories.

Report: Postmates and DoorDash mull over merger 

Sources told Recode that Postmates and DoorDash, two food delivery giants, have discussed a possible merger at least once over the past year. This move would be a bid to gain advantage over competitors like GrubHub and UberEats in the hotly-contested food delivery war.

These murmurings come only a month after DoorDash secured $535 million in funding, which they said they would use to expand operations (and maybe invest in robots?). As of now there’s no deal, but this wouldn’t be such a bad idea. The food delivery sector is just too crowded — if these competitors could pull off a merger and optimize their service, I say go for it.

Photo: Pixabay

Unilever wants to turn plastic waste into food safe packaging

Unilever announced this week that it’s starting a new initiative to recycle polyethylene terephthalate resin, which is commonly used in clothing, food and drink packaging, and engineering projects. They want to turn any of their products made with PET resin, including ones that are colored, into transparent, food safe packaging. The consumer goods giant is partnering with recycling tech startup Ioniqa and Indorama Ventures, the world’s largest producer of PET resin, on the project.

It’s an interesting time in the world of food packaging. Various groups, including NASA and the military, are trying to make it lighter, safer, and more resilient. This initiative from Unilever might make it more environmentally friendly, as well. But it’s got a long way to go; currently, 91% of plastic waste isn’t recycled. With a massive company like Unilever behind it, this project might be able to reduce that statistic significantly. 

Credit-TECAL-GIM-UEx.jpg

MRIs can qualify meat taste without touching them

Researchers at the University of Extremadura in Spain have found a way to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the same technology used in hospitals to look inside our bodies, to measure the taste properties of whole loins and hams — without touching them.

The technology uses non-invasive magnets and radio waves to take images of the meat, which is then run through a computer vision algorithm. Scientists can use the images and readings they see to make predictions on the quality of the meat, including its fat content, color, and salt content, without having to damage a pricey Iberico ham.

This research indicates another approach to food safety monitoring and quality control, which is a fast-growing market full of startups like Mimica and FoodLogiQ.

 

Would brewers replace hops with GMO yeast?

Hold on to your IPAs: A team of chemists and geneticists in California have developed a genetically modified yeast that can mimic the flavor and aroma of hops. To make it, they spliced DNA from mint and basil plants into the genes of brewing yeast, which gave the yeast a grapefruit-like flavor typical of the Cascade hop.

By swapping out hops for GM yeast, brewers could have greater control over their product, reduce the costs of beer-brewing, and reduce environmental impact. As might be expected, craft brewers aren’t eager to replace hops with GM yeast — they feel it takes some of the art out of brewing. But we’re seeing more and more intersections of beer and tech, from IoT-powered beer tracking systems to beer publishing systems for at-home brewers.

 

Photo: AgVend

AgVend raises $1.75M in seed funding

Last week ag-commerce startup AgVend raised $1.75 million in seed funding. The round was led by Drew Oetting at 8VC, with participation from Green Bay Ventures, Seahawk Capital, The House Fund, and others.

Agvend is a digital commerce platform which lets farmers compare prices and purchase ag services and inputs. With AgVend, farmers can order a specific fertilizer and have it delivered (via AgVend’s partners) the same day or take advantage of flash sales promotions, without ever leaving their farm. The startup launched at the beginning of 2018 and now covers states across the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, with plans to expand later this year.

This year has been a big one for agtech startups. In the last few months indoor farming company Agrilyst and peer-to-peer farming network WeFarm also closed fundraising rounds. Agtech is definitely a growing market, and one to keep an eye on.

Will DoorDash’s New $535M Mean More Robots?

Restaurant delivery startup, DoorDash, announced today that it has raised a whopping $535 million Series D round. The new funding was led by SoftBank (more on that in a minute) and reportedly gives DoorDash a $1.4 billion valuation. DoorDash has now raised more than $721 million in total.

According to TechCrunch, the new money will be used to expand DoorDash from 600 to 1,600 cities, and to hire 250 more people. Additionally, the company plans to make “big investments” in its DoorDash Drive platform. Drive is the company’s service that allows restaurants to accept orders directly (not through the DoorDash app), yet still use DoorDash’s drivers for delivery.

Providing restaurants with a way to fulfill orders without going through the DoorDash app could be a key differentiator for DoorDash as it fights in the battle royale that is the restaurant delivery space. The company can use all the cash it can get as it goes up against GrubHub, Postmates, Amazon and UberEats–which, by the way, SoftBank is an investor as well.

Uber recently purchased Ando, David Chang’s delivery-only restaurant in New York. The Spoon’s Allen Weiner recently noted that this acquisition could translate into more vertical integration, resulting in UberEATS promoting its own food versus meals from other establishments.

DoorDash’s Drive enables the inverse of that. Control is decentralized from its own app and given over to individual restaurants. Empowering restaurants with more delivery options could add more fuel to the virtual restaurant boom we’re experiencing, allowing restaurants to experiment with new cuisines and products online for delivery only, without having to invest in physical infrastructure.

I’m also curious to see if this new money will spur any big forward movement with robot delivery. DoorDash partnered with Marble during the summer of last year for a food delivery pilot program in San Francisco, and worked with Starship Technologies for a pilot in Redwood City and Washington D.C..

Of course, with big money and big valuations comes big expectations. With a sufficiently large warchest, the pressure is now on DoorDash to not just succeed, but exceed expectations.

News bites: DoorDash CFO, ChowNow Dough and Soylent’s No

Here are a few news stories from around the web that you may have missed.

DoorDash CFO leaves company. Mike Dinsdale didn’t even last a full year with the food delivery startup, has left to join Gusto as its new CFO. (TechCrunch)

ChowNow gobbles up $20M in Series B. The online food ordering service offers restaurants a white label platform for their own use, and has a mobile restaurant discovery app. The company has raised roughly $40 million to date. (TechCrunch)

Canada tells Soylent to take off. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency blocks sales of the Silicon Valley drink because it does not meet all the criteria for being a “meal replacement.” (CNN Money)

Amazon-owned Whole Foods may be a boon to smaller companies. Some food startups welcome their new Bezos overlord, and his ability to centralize buying and expand customer bases. (USA Today)

The Spoon Video Top Three: Food Truck Tech, Robo-delivery and Instant Aging For Wine

It’s the Spoon’s video top 3, recaping three trending stories about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen from the past week.

This week’s we take a look at Bistro Planets’s food truck tech, DoorDash’s pilot program with Marble for delivery robots and whether or not instant aging is the newest trend in wine.

Enjoy!

Delivery Platform DoorDash Hires Marble’s Robot Drivers For Food Delivery

If you live in San Francisco and order from DoorDash, you might find a friendly Marble robot on your front door step the next time you get takeout. Today DoorDash announced it would be using autonomous ground-delivery robots made by Marble, a robotics startup, for a food delivery pilot program in select San Francisco neighborhoods.

Marble was founded in 2015 by robotics enthusiasts Matt Delaney, Jason Calaiaro, Kevin Peterson while they attended Carnegie Mellon and describes themselves as a “scrappy robotics startup” working to build autonomous urban delivery robots. Scrappy as they might be, DoorDash is the second delivery pilot they’ve announced this year, partnering in April with Yelp’s Eat24.

The companies report that the pilot will allow them to “explore how to best optimize last-mile deliveries” and the first restaurant to take part in the robot delivery program fast food chain Jack in the Box. They made a quick video to show off Marble robots toting its first DoorDash deliveries in the North Beach neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Jack in the Box | Robot Delivery

The revenue model for robotics companies to partner with retail or food delivery services hasn’t been fully divulged; a spokesperson did say that Marble is being compensated for the work done in the pilot but declined to elaborate. However, delivery fees for a robot driver versus a human are the same for DoorDash customers. Marble said it didn’t have any hard data about how robot drivers create cost savings for delivery companies but that it hoped to share that information down the road.

Food delivery is an increasingly crowded space; aside from traditional restaurant delivery, “new delivery models” – companies like DoorDash, GrubHub and Eat24 – is expected to be a $20 billion market by 2025 according to a McKinsey report. In order to create efficiencies and differentiate, companies are looking to innovations like robot delivery drivers to stay ahead. And Marble isn’t the only game in sidewalk robotic delivery – former founders of Skype launched autonomous robotics startup Starship and received a $17 milllion investment earlier this year from carmarker Daimler Benz.

Starship had also announced a pilot in Redwood City, CA with DoorDash earlier this year. When asked if this program was designed to replace the competitive pilot, DoorDash responded that it was “…continuing the existing pilot with Starship in Redwood City, Washington DC, San Carlos and Sunnyvale. The Marble partnership adds to that relationship, allowing DoorDash to bring robot deliveries to San Francisco while also testing a new type of form factor and technology.”

Meanwhile, if you happen to see a Marble delivery robot on the sidewalk, you’ll probably see a human chaperone with it to answer questions and assist with interactions. At times when there isn’t a person nearby, Marble says they have remote operators ready to assist with issues and so far, they haven’t encountered any problems in the neighborhoods they’re serving.

The Food Delivery Boom Comes At A Price

Food delivery startups have been all the rage, dominating food tech investment for the last several years. In what has become an extremely crowded market, there are signs that the market is shifting, with companies like Square reportedly looking to sell off its food delivery business Caviar and competitors like Postmates struggling to raise more funds.

But even with the consolidation, food delivery startups have added a level of convenience to ordering takeout that consumers are now used to. But at what cost?

The New Food Economy, a non-profit publication that publishes long form pieces on the forces that are changing food as we know it, published a piece looking at the dark side of food delivery and the challenges it presents to small restaurant owners.

The business models of companies like Seamless, UberEats, Yelp Eat24 and Postmates goes like this: hungry customer goes online to order food. Instead of going to a specific restaurant’s website and ordering through their system or picking up the phone (an antiquated notion these days), they visit a food delivery website that gives them menus, pricing, online ordering and delivery options for all the area eateries. The GrubHubs of the world then turn around and charge said eateries 10-30% of each order. The lowered margins aren’t desirable, but the idea is that the increased volume from the food delivery site will make up for it.

Except that’s not always the case. Working with these services requires the business to have a tablet on site that takes orders and it can get overwhelming to track different orders from different services. And then there’s the matter of profit – when Teddy Roland, a restaurant owner profiled in the New Food Economy piece, tried to raise his delivery prices, Postmates and DoorDash refused.

“How is that different from the Mafia in the 70s saying, ‘I’m going to take 200 bucks not to break your legs?’” he says. “‘We’re going to take 20 percent of your money and you have to live with 80 percent.’ – Roland

The longer piece is worth the read. It’s not surprising that consumer appetite for more convenience comes at a price. Lower-priced clothing is made by workers making unlivable wages in deplorable conditions, cheap meat is produced by giant factory farms and quick food delivery services take profits from take out joints who are often small businesses.

Some restaurants are fighting back and using tactics to encourage customers to take the extra step and keep their money in the restaurant. Says Roland, ““I’m asking a little more out of my customers,” he says. “You want to be lazy and just use your thumbprint and GrubHub app, you’re going to pay more for it, that’s all.”

DoorDash Adds a B2B View to the On-Demand Home Delivery Market

DoorDash’s latest TV spot shows a family relaxing in their San Francisco Victorian home when they are suddenly alerted that dinner has arrived. As a micro sized red car pulls up, dad jumps out of his chair, daughter pushes over her toy tea set and Rover makes a beeline for the door. Mom answers the doorbell where she is greeted by a smiling “Dasher” who hands her the food. Dad and daughter are hanging out the window grinning as if they had won the Publishers Clearing House prize. Yes, it’s DoorDash, and the spot ends with the slogan, “Get ready to get the door.”

The finely crafted 30-second ad may inspire customers to download the DoorDash app and order up their Sunday supper. However, the company’s recent announcements indicate restaurant-to-home-delivery is only a small part of its vision.  In Dec. 2016, the company launched DoorDash Drive, a service in which a restaurant can place the delivery order and indicate its destination. Drive is part of what company executives say is a point of competitive differentiation—a focus on the backend/infrastructure.

“With DoorDash Drive, we’re building the first logistics layer for restaurants, to solve deliveries that may or may not originate on the DoorDash marketplace,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu said in a recent interview with Fast Company. “A lot of times, an off-premise order, whether it’s takeout or delivery, doesn’t necessarily happen through an app. It happens over the telephone or in person. A merchant may want to fulfill those deliveries, and so why can’t there be a way for them to do that?”

Amazon’s Prime Now restaurant delivery is poised to provide major competition to DoorDash as an infrastructure provider. Already one of the world’s largest backend providers with AWS, Prime Now offers restaurants a merchant app which can accept, cancel or refund orders. No doubt, that’s the tip of the iceberg for what Amazon can provide its clients.

As a straight-up restaurant delivery company, DoorDash is much smaller than GrubHub with far less financial resources. In fact, DoorDash’s most recent investment round in 2016 dropped its valuation to $700 million, with share prices dropping 16% between its second and third fundraising campaign. The focus on money is crucial for a company intent on earning its reputation by building a comprehensive infrastructure to handle restaurant delivery logistics. DoorDash’s theory is that if an eatery can use its Dashers to handle inbound and outbound orders, the establishment can expand its catering business.

DoorDash Drive product manager Abhay Sukumaran says his company’s aim is to build a “programmatically accessible logistics network” that becomes a platform for its customers to add its own personalization such as linking it to a CRM system. “The goal is that this infrastructure becomes something that you can build other things on top of,” he told Fast Company.

Taking on delivery for restaurants and caterers could be a good market niche for DoorDash, but it will not be without its challenges. For example, a delivery person handling a large order on behalf of a food client becomes more of a representative of the establishment. While a restaurant can set rules for its own drivers regarding appearance and customer interactions, working with virtual delivery agents cuts out such important controls.

But there are delivery agents DoorDash can control—the robotic kind. U.K.-based Starship Technologies is working with DoorDash in Redwood City, CA to test a small number of its remote-controlled robots as surrogates for humans for short-distance food delivery.

DoorDash is by no means leaving its food delivery roots behind. They already operate in 300 cities in the U.S. and the company is adding liquor delivery and small-item grocery delivery from Whole Foods to its roster. That seems like a lot of the company’s plate as it tries to ride its infrastructure vision to either an IPO or big-ticket takeover.