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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

drones

Precision AI Raises $20M Seed Round for Drone-Powered Surgical Herbicide Application

Precision AI, an automated precision agriculture startup, announced today that it has raised a $20 million in Seed round of equity and grant funding. The round was co-led by At One Ventures and the Industrial Innovation Venture Fund of BDC Capital, with participation from Fulcrum Global Capital and Golden Opportunities, as well as non-dilutive co-investment from Sustainable Development Technology Canada and Protein Industries Canada.

Based in Regina, Canada, Precision AI uses a combination of drones and computer vision to conduct precise application of herbicides and pesticides on weeds. Precision AI’s system deploys swarms of drones that fly over farm fields. The drones can carry a 25 lbs. payload and have a 55 minute flight time. Equipped with both cameras and a sprayer, the drones’ system automatically identifies weeds and sprays them with specific dose of pesticide or herbicide.

The goal is to reduce the waste and cost that comes from indiscriminate, broad application of chemicals to tackle weeds. Additionally, Precision AI’s approach only sprays the weeds, not the crops themselves, so there are fewer chemicals applied to the food we consumer. Precision AI says its drone approach to weed control on large acreage crops is much cheaper than traditional large farming machinery and could reduce the amount of pesticide use by up to 95 percent while maintaining crop yield and saving farmers $52 per acre per growing season.

Precision AI sits at the Nexus of a few trends happening in agriculture. The first, fittingly, is bringing precision control to farms. Sensors and IoT allow the monitoring of things like soil moisture, plant temperature, and fertilization on a more granular level. To get these levels of precision, we’re also seeing automation coming to farms in the form of robots that do everything from carrying gear to zapping weeds with electricity to harvesting crops. Drones are also being employed more monitor farm conditions and plant growth and even pick fruit.

Automation on the farm is actually a topic we’ll be tackling at our upcoming ArticulATE food robotics and automation virtual summit on May 18th. We’ll have speakers from Future Acres, AgShift and AgFunder discussing the opportunities that lie ahead for automated precision agriculture. Get your ticket today!

Kroger Taking Flight with Drone Delivery Pilot This Spring

Kroger announced today that it is working with Drone Express, a division of TELEGRID Technologies, to launch a drone delivery pilot starting this spring.

The first test of the new drone delivery will begin this week near the Kroger Marketplace in Centerville, Ohio (just outside of Dayton). Actual customer deliveries are scheduled to begin later this spring with a second pilot launching this summer at a Ralphs in California.

But Kroger isn’t just planning on sending drones to your front yard. In the press announcement, the company indicated that it’s looking to get customers the last minute items they need, wherever that may be. So that could be picnic supplies to a park, or cold drinks at a hot beach. Kroger said that drone deliveries will be limited to a payload of around five pounds and deliveries of eligible orders should arrive within 15 minutes.

When we talk about drone food delivery, it’s usually centered around restaurants. Because drones can reach their destinations so quickly, they are shaping up to be a viable option for hot restaurant meal delivery. But we are starting to see drone delivery gain traction with grocery retailers. In Ireland, Manna has a partnership with Tesco, and here in the U.S., Walmart is working with Flytrex to test out drone deliveries in North Carolina and Rouses Market is using Deuce Drone to trial deliveries in Alabama.

It should also be noted that with this drone trial, Kroger continues to show its tech-forward thinking. So far this year, Kroger has opened the first of its robot-powered customer fulfillment centers, and started piloting more automated checkout via Caper’s smart shopping carts. Plus the fact that Kroger is launching two drone delivery pilots this year shows the company is being more aggressive about aerial delivery than its competitors (at least publicly).

If you are interested in the future of drones delivery, then you must come to ArticulATE, our food automation virtual summit happening on May 18. We’ll have a full panel devoted to drones featuring the CEO of Manna. Get your ticket today!

Flytrex Raised $8M to Expand U.S. Drone Delivery Operations

Drone delivery startup Flytrex announced last week that it has raised $8 million in new funding. According to Bloomberg, most of the round came from previous backers including Benhamou Global Ventures and European venture fund Btov, and is part of a bigger round that will close later this year. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Flytrex to $20.3 million.

Tel Aviv-based Flytrex has been making commercial drone deliveries since 2018. As of 2020, Flytrex had completed more than a thousand deliveries in Reykjavik, Iceland. The company has also been operating on a limited basis here in the U.S. Last year it was making deliveries at King’s Walk golf course in North Dakota, and announced a pilot program with Walmart to make deliveries in Fayetville, North Carolina.

As Bloomberg pointed out, the only FAA-approved drone delivery operators in the U.S. are Alphabet’s Wing, Amazon and UPS. But the FAA also issued new rules around drone safety and nighttime flying rules at the end of 2020, which should allow for more approvals for startups such as Flytrex and Deuce Drone, which is doing grocery deliveries in Alabama.

Though there are sill a number of regulatory and safety hurdles to be worked out, we’re starting to see drone delivery literally take off in different parts of the world. In Ireland, Manna is doing 50 – 100 drone deliveries a day. In Brazil, iFood is aloft, and in Israel, Dragontail Systems has partnered with Pizza Hut for pizza drone delivery.

As rules are clarified, and assuming these pilot programs prove themselves economical, we should start to see an acceleration of similar announcements around done delivery funding and expansion here in the U.S.

If you are interested in the future of drone delivery, be sure to attend our ArticulaATE food automation and robotics virtual conference on May 18!

Food Tech News: The World’s Largest Piece of Cultured Meat, Coca-Cola Delivery Via Drone

Welcome to this week’s Food Tech News round-up! We found some interesting tidbits this week, including the world’s largest piece of cultured meat, Coca-Cola’s drone delivery, Carnival Cruise’s step towards sustainability, and funding for HIPPEAS chickpea snacks.

NovaMeat produces the world’s largest piece of cultured meat

3D meat printer NovaMeat announced that it had successfully created what it is calling the world’s largest piece of cultured meat, with a volume of 22500 mm3 (1.4 cubic inches). NovaMeat has so far created 3D-printed steak and pork made from plant-based proteins, but is now creating hybrid meat alternatives through the combination of plant-proteins and cells from cultivated meat. After announcing this accomplishment, the company shared it will hold an investment round in the next few months and aims to increase the production speed of its 3D-printed meat to 100Kg/hour.

Photo from Coca-Cola’s website

Coca-Cola delivers coffee flavored soda via drone

Coca-Cola partnered with Walmart and drone provider DroneUP to make aerial deliveries of its new beverage, a coffee-infused soda. The drone was launched from a Walmart in Coffee County, Georgia, and delivered to a select few consumers located within a mile of the Walmart. The coffee soda is infused with Brazilian coffee, and comes in three flavors, caramel, dark blend, and vanilla – with a sugar-free option in the vanilla and dark blend flavors. The 12oz cans are shelf-stable and offer 69mg of caffeine. The soda was trialed successfully in Japan in 2018, and as of it January 25th, 2021, the Coca-Cola with Coffee beverage is now available in the US.

Photo of a digester from BioHiTech’s website

Carnival Cruise Lines and Princess Cruise Lines aim to reduce food waste through BioHiTech’s food digesters

BioHiTech, which offers technology solutions and services to combat the environmental issues of landfill waste, will provide 14 cruise ships from Carnival Cruise Lines and Princess Cruise Lines with its Revolution Series food digesters for food waste onboard. The digesters process food waste through odorless, aerobiotic digestion and convert the waste into a liquid that can be drained into the cruise ship’s wastewater line. This prevents food waste from reaching the landfill and saves the cruise line costs associated with waste management. The order from BioHiTech totals approximately $2 million USD and will be completed in Q2 of 2021.

Photo from HIPPEAS’ Instagram

HIPPEAS raises $50M for chickpea snacks

Whole Foods predicted that chickpea would trend as an ingredient in 2021, and they certainly were correct. Chickpeas are being used in everything from alternative eggs to snack foods, and HIPPEAS Organic Chickpea Snacks announced that it has raised $50 million in funding this week from The Craftory Limited. The company will use these funds to increase production, expand distribution, and add to its positive impact projects. All of the company’s products are organic, vegan, gluten-free, and products include flavored chickpea puffs and chickpea tortilla chips. I can personally attest that HIPPEAS products are delicious, and it is too easy to crush an entire bag of the vegan white cheddar chickpea puffs.

Manna to Make Drone Delivery Flights Outside Dublin, Ireland Next Month

Meal delivery by drone is coming to the outskirts of Dublin, Ireland at the end of March, courtesy of the Irish startup, Manna, reports Bloomberg. Manna will run hundreds of tests flights with different food partners to make deliveries to the University College Dublin campus over the next few weeks as part of a bigger plan to provide permanent service to small Irish towns.

Manna’s MNA-1090 drone operates similarly to the Google Wing drone, in that it hovers above its destination and lowers its package on a retractable tether. According to Blooomberg the Manna drone can carry a meal payload weighing 4.4 pounds, and can make a delivery more than 2 kilometers out in under three minutes, even in inclement weather.

Drones are set to have a pretty big year in food delivery. In addition to Manna’s impending takeoff, Unilever, through its Ben & Jerry’s brand, has partnered with Terra Drone Europe for airborne ice cream tests. Uber Eats is planning to launch its drone food delivery in San Diego this summer. And the aforementioned Google Wing is already making deliveries in Virginia.

Questions remain, however, about the ultimately viability of drone delivery. Regulations around toting pizza pies in the skies has yet to be worked out (though startups like Air Space Link are helping sort that out). Then there is the very real issue of privacy and noise and how people will react to fleets of drones flying over their houses.

The promise of drones, however, according to Manna, is that they can provide fast, big city-type food delivery to smaller towns at a lower cost. This, in turn will make delivery more profitable and drone operations more scalable.

If drones can provide a lower cost way of getting a piping hot burrito delivered to people’s patio, all the hindrances might just be forgiven.

Video: Airspace Link Gets Immediate FAA Approvals for Commercial Drone Flights

The idea of drones zipping through the sky to deliver you burritos in just minutes sounds so cyberpunky and cool. Because it is! That’s why companies like Google and Uber Eats are investing so heavily in the technology.

But as with so many things, to get something that’s cool, there is a lot of very unglamorous grunt work going on behind the scenes. For commercial drone deliveries, Airspace Link is looking to make one of those bits of drudgery a little bit easier: plotting out and receiving official approval for flight paths.

Airspace Link works with both the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and local governments to help commercial drone operators understand both air and ground risks and establish approved flight paths. Michael Healander, CEO and President of Airspace Link, told me by phone this week that his company is one of only five in the world that can authorize commercial drone flights near airports to ensure that they don’t interfere with things like air traffic. (Healander said that “near” is typically within five miles of an airport.)

But getting federal clearance for a flight path and understanding air-based risk is only one half of the equation. That’s why Airspace also works with local governments to get data around ground-based risks that the FAA wouldn’t know about. Those risks include things like schools, jails, or even emergency situations that a commercial drone operator would want to know about and avoid when establishing a flight plan for a delivery.

Airspace’s value prop, according to Healander, is that its software can automate that flight plan process quickly and automatically. To illustrate, Airspace Link posted a video on Linkedin this week, showing how the software works. The video is in no way “cool.” There is no dramatic footage of a drone soaring through a forest of skyscrapers. It’s a screen capture video of someone entering the basics of a drone flight: departure point, delivery point, time of flight etc. Once all that information is in, Airspace Link establishes a route that takes into consideration the ground-based risks like schools, establishes a route and altitude path and gets approval from the FAA in under a minute.

We are at the very beginning stages of drone delivery, with Google testing the concept in Virginia, and Uber Eats planning it for next summer in San Diego. If these services catch on with consumers, there will be a halo effect with startups like AirSpace Link popping up to do more of the grunt work so drones deliveries can actually take off and be cool.

From Power to Perception, What Challenges Do Drone and Robot Delivery Need to Tackle?

The devil is in the details, as they say, and this became more apparent then ever after I moderated a panel on robot and drone delivery at GreenBiz’s Verge 19 conference in Oakland, CA this week. These devilish details, however, are important for everyone involved in the food space: retailers, delivery services, governments and even consumers to consider as autonomous robotic delivery moves from sci-fi to sidewalk.

On the panel were Jill North, Innovation and New Technology Program Manager for the City of San Jose; Natasha Blum Founder & Principal Director, Research & Strategy at Blumline; Matthew Lipka, Federal Public Policy Lead for Nuro; and Connor French, General Counsel at Zipline International.

The biggest takeaway from our lively discussion was just how complicated it is to deploy robots and drones, and how we are learning about these complications in real time. This was perfectly illustrated with news this week that the University of Pittsburgh is pausing its robot delivery with Starship because the robots may have been blocking people from wheelchairs from accessing the sidewalk. The real world has a way of bringing up complexities that may not have been foreseen while testing or were perhaps just ignored.

As a government employee, the real world is very much where North works. As an employee of the city of San Jose, she has to find a balance between pushing innovation ahead and not leaving people behind. Robots can’t be implemented just because they are cool, or because they get tech bros their burritos faster. She needs to answer questions like who has access to these new services? How will they interact with emergency services? How will they get electrical power? And because all this is so new, there aren’t a lot of answers right now.

Blum, however, is in the business of finding answers. Her Blumline research and design firm helped work on Postmates’ Serve robot by taking an ethnographic approach. Her team went into specific communities to learn what would be considered friendly or off-putting in a robot design. For example: should a robot sit higher and be more visible and sacrifice maneuverability or the other way around? One interesting outcome of Blum’s work could be that robots are customized for each community, featuring different colors or designs that make people more comfortable with the emerging automation in our lives.

Another technology that faces an uphill battle when it comes to getting people on board is drones. As French explained, drones are either associated with battlefield killing machines, tools of a surveillance state, or just the loud, buzzy nuisance that someone flies at the park. This puts the drone industry in a bit of a conundrum. It needs to expand into more benevolent purposes (e.g. medicine and food delivery to remote or hard to reach areas), but it can’t do so until more people are more comfortable with the idea of drones flying over their neighborhoods.

One company already in neighborhoods is Nuro, which has been using its pod-like, low-speed vehicles for grocery delivery in cities like Scottsdale, AZ, and Houston, TX. Lipka pointed out was that even if you work and engage with cities, communities and consumers, Mother Nature can still come along and throw you a curveball. A curveball like haboobs, which are intense dust storms that spring up in places like Arizona. These storms can do all kinds of damage to the sensors and cameras on a Nuro. Learning to interact with the idiosyncrasies associated with different environments is something robot and drone designers must pay attention to as well.

Finally, the big, yet-to-be-answered question from all of this innovation in the drone and robot delivery space is: Who pays for what? As North pointed out, more autonomous robot delivery means fewer people paying for parking, a major source of municipal income. Who pays for the upkeep of roads or new infrastructure like expanded sidewalks or special lanes on roads? The taxpayer? The private company?

This is all new territory, and again, it’s evolving in real-time right in front of us. But discussions like the one from this panel will help more people think about and develop strategies around solving the issues before they happen, rather than trying to fix them after the fact.

Uber Drones to Drop Fancy In-N-Haute Burgers on San Diego

“Uber,” “drones,” and “delivery” are three words we’re going to see a lot of in future. Late last week, word got out that the company has been testing food delivery via drones in San Diego, dropping McDonald’s meals off at set locations.

This week, we learned Uber has also added some fine dining to the drone delivery menu from Juniper & Ivy. The upscale restaurant, which is the brainchild of Richard Blais and Mike Rosen, will make its “In-N-Haute” burger available through Uber Eats for drone delivery once the program kicks off. As the name suggests, item is a $21 take on In-N-Out’s signature “double-double” burger, complete with brioche bun and a fancy take on In-N-Out’s famous “animal-style” sauce.

Once these overpriced burgers hit the air, supplies will reportedly be very limited, with no more than a dozen orders available on any given evening, according to Sandiagoville.com.

For the Uber delivery program, food isn’t dropped via drone directly on your doorstep. Rather, the drone flies it to a set drop-off location where an Uber Eats driver will retrieve it and take it the rest of the way. As my colleague Chris Albrecht pointed out when he wrote about the program last week, “This may seem overly complicated, but Uber says a drone can travel 1.5 miles in 7 minutes versus 21 minutes by ground. So a drone could fly past city congestion to shave off delivery time, even with a pick-up car involved.”

Shaving time off the delivery process will be especially important for expensive burgers that could go cold very quickly while in transit.

The In-N-Haute will be Juniper & Ivy’s only menu item available for drone delivery once Uber’s program kicks off, which will be in either late summer or early fall 2019. No word yet as to whether the restaurant will add more items as Uber’s delivery programs gets its legs.

What will be most interesting about this test is whether people will actually pay $21 (plus delivery fees and tip) to get a high-end burger delivered and, more important, if they’d do it on a regular basis. That’s presumably why Uber’s chosen to test its drone deliveries via two extremes: haute cuisine and fast food. Whichever is more successful in terms of both quality of the food when it finally arrives at your door step as well as overall customer satisfaction with the experience, will tell Uber a lot about where to bet its hand in the upcoming drone delivery race.

Zomato Acquires TechEagle Innovations for Drone Delivery of Food in India

Restaurant discovery and food delivery app Zomato announced yesterday that it has acquired drone developer and fellow Indian startup, TechEagle Innovations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Zomato currently works with 75,000 restaurants to deliver food in 100 cities in India. With the TechEagle acquisition, Zomato plans to build out a network for aerial food delivery in its home country. Food delivery is playing an increasingly important role for the company, and has jumped to 65 percent of Zomato’s revenue in December from 35 percent back in January of this year.

Now the company is looking to take its food delivery business sky high. Literally.

In a press announcement (courtesy of The Hindu Times), Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said, “We are currently at the early stage of aerial innovations and are taking baby steps towards building a tomorrow wherein users can expect a drone to deliver the food they ordered online. We believe that robots powering the last mile delivery is an inevitable part of the future and hence is going to be a significant area of investment for us.”

Goyal’s words come just a couple of months after it was uncovered that Uber wants to greatly accelerate its own drone food delivery ambitions for Uber Eats, potentially coming to market as soon as 2021. And this summer, Amazon re-emerged in the drone delivery discussion with a patent for in-flight recharging of drones.

But up until this point, Uber and Amazon have been all talk–with good reason. Here in the U.S., regulations around drone and commercial drone operations have yet to be defined. Issues around where drones can fly, safety measures, noise ordinances and even infrastructure still need to be worked out. I’m not familiar with regulation in India, but Quartz reports that a pizzeria launched delivery by drone four years ago, only to have it abruptly halted by local authorities over permissions and security threats.

Four years is a long time in the tech world, and Zomato seems to be undaunted. Even if it is just “baby steps” at this point, the TechEagle acquisition is a concrete move towards food delivery flying overhead. Success in India, however, won’t guarantee global success, as Zomato will still have to navigate the patchwork of drone laws that will emerge in each country.

Amazon Patent Points to In-Flight Recharging For Delivery Drones

Ever since Jeff Bezos teased the idea of drone deliveries on 60 Minutes in 2013, the tech world has been abuzz with the idea. At the time Bezos said that the reality of drone deliveries wasn’t there yet, but he thought it just might be in 4-5 years.

Based on when Bezos made that prediction, that’s about now, and from the looks of it Amazon’s been working hard on ideas to make drone delivered milk a reality.

One of the limiting factors for drone delivery has been battery life. High-quality drones usually can stay in the air for only 30 minutes, and the longer a drone has to recharge, the less packages a fleet can deliver.

Not surprisingly, Amazon has been thinking about this and one of the ideas they’ve come up to ensure you can get your drone-delivered milk is to create flying delivery-bots that recharge…while still in the air. The concept explained in their just-issued patent is similar to that of a wind turbine, but instead of giant propellers the drones will have on-board propellers that spin to generate energy. The patent also describes how the the propellers are adjustable to maximize energy generation and that energy would be created both by windflow and kinetic (in-motion) energy.

The above graphic shows the concept of how the drone will monitors flight paths to find higher-wind flight paths to ensure maximal energy generation. The drone will both change flight path and as well as adjust the energy-generating propellers to make sure they are generating both the most wind-generated and kinetic energy as possible.

The concept of energy generating drones isn’t entirely new. Researchers have been discussing the idea of using tethered drones to produce energy through the use of small mini-wind turbines on board for a couple years, but the concept have largely centered around how drones could basically act as a windmill replacement.  What’s novel about Amazon’s idea is that the energy generation concept appears to be focused on how to recharge the on-board battery to ensure longer flight time as well as higher overall in-air utilization.

No word on when we’ll see Amazon’s energy-generating drones, but if Bezos had his way, they might just be around the corner.

Food Tech News Roundup: Google Groceries, Icelandic Drones, and More “Bleeding” Vegan Burgers

What a week! We just wrapped up our first ever Smart Kitchen Europe event in Dublin. It was a whirlwind few days jam-packed with content and networking as foodtech innovators from across the continent got together to forge the future of food tech. If you’re curious, get to know the winner of our SKS Europe startup showcase, and read up on some smart ktichen news that dropped on the show floor. And of course, if you want to connect with many of the innovators from SKS Europe as well as a whole bunch more in person, make sure you’re at our flagship event in Seattle come October.

But enough about us — here’s a list of the some of the food tech news stories that snagged our interest this week. Perfect for reading over a second cup of coffee while fighting jet lag.

Photo: Naturl’i Foods.

Sainsbury’s to add plant-based “bleeding” burger to meat section
British retail giant Sainsbury’s announced this week that it will debut a “bleeding” plant-based burger in June 27th in 400 locations. In the spirit of the Impossible Burger or Moving Mountains, the patty is meant to look, smell, cook, and taste like a beef burger in an attempt to woo flexitarians who are trying to reduce their meat consumption but don’t want to compromise on flavor. The plant-based burger, made by Danish brand Naturli’ Foods, will be sold alongside its beef counterparts in the meat section. This announcement comes not long after Tesco, another large U.K.-based grocery chain, released the news that it would carry Beyond Burgers in their shops beginning in July of this year.

 

Photographer: Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg

Iceland amps up drone deliveries in Reykjavik
Aha, Iceland’s largest online marketplace, is slated to expand the number of drones it flies through Reykjavik over the next two years. That’s right, expand — this would be in addition to the limited drone trial they launched last year with Israeli company Flytrex last year.

According to the BBC, the drones could be used to speedily shuttle everything from pizzas to organs destined for transplant — as long as they’re below the maximum weight of 3kg (6lb, 9oz). Their results will no doubt be critical for companies like UberEats, who are also piloting drone delivery programs.

Photo: Clearly Kombucha.

Molson Coors acquires California-based Kombucha brand
Kombucha, a non-alcoholic fermented tea beverage with purported gut health benefits, is not for everyone. But it appears that it’s certainly for Molson Coors, who recently acquired California-based brand Clearly Kombucha. The kombucha brand was founded in 2010 and will become part of Molson Coors’ craft and specialty import division, Tenth and Blake.

According to Grand View Research, the global kombucha market is expected to reach $4.46 billion by 2024. Lately, Molson Coors has been investing in non-alcoholic beverages; last year they purchased a minority stake in Bhakti, a Colorado-based chai tea company.

Photo: MiAlgae

Scottish agtech company raises £500k
MiAlgae, a Scottish company that turns algae into nutrient-dense animal and fish feed, raised £500k ($665k) from backers including Equity Gap, SIB and Edinburgh University’s Old College, reported the U.K. Business Angels Association. The algae is grown using co-products from the Scottish whiskey distillation process (yum), and is high in omega-3 and other nutrients. As it’s made from a byproduct, the feed also has a low environmental footprint, which is critical as our global demand for, and production of, meat and fish continues to grow.

 

Photo: ndb_photo via Flickr.

Google to sell groceries through Home and Assistant platforms in France
Earlier this week Google announced a joint venture with French grocery chain Carrefour. According to Bloomberg, the retailer said that this partnership marks the first time in France that fresh food will be marketed through Google’s platforms. French shoppers will be able to buy grocery products through Google Home and Google Assistant by 2019. This comes a little more than a month after Google unveiled Duplex, which allows Google Assistant to have surprisingly realistic phone conversations to do things like make restaurant reservations. We’ll see if this move can make Google Home/Assistant a competitor with Amazon’s Alexa, who already partnered with U.K. retailers for voice-controlled grocery shopping.

Food Tech News: Celebrity Meal Kits, Beer Delivery, and UberEats Drones

This was a pretty thrilling week for food-related innovation in big data and AI. We wrote about a patent that lets Facebook see inside your fridge and recommend personalized recipes. Google debuted its Duplex technology, which allows it to hold freakishly realistic-sounding phone conversations (listen to it make a restaurant reservation, it’s insane). Perhaps most importantly of all, we wrote about a man who cracked the code for perfect chocolate chip cookies.

And now it’s time for our weekly food tech news roundup. We’ve got stories featuring clean meat labeling, drones, beer delivery, and Chrissy Teigen — let’s dive in:

Photo: Wikipedia.

Uber tests food delivery drone
UberEats has launched a trial program in San Diego testing food delivery via drone, reported Bloomberg. The world’s largest food delivery program could now theoretically drop off your pad thai in as little as five minutes, according to UberEats CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Of course that’s presuming that the food you’re ordering is already made, but still — that’s quite a bit speedier than even the fastest average food delivery wait time (from, you guessed it, UberEats).

 

Photo: Blue Apron.

Blue Apron teams up with Chrissy Teigen
Just a week after meal kit service Blue Apron announced they were putting their wares on Costco shelves, they revealed more news: they’re collaborating with model/cookbook author/Instagram celebrity Chrissy Teigen on a six-week lineup of recipes and ingredient boxes. The series will start on June 4th and, despite their launch into retail, will only be available via online delivery.

 

Photo: Pizza Hut.

Pizza Hut expands beer delivery
Pizza Hut launched a test program in Phoenix in December to deliver beer and wine alongside their cheesy crust-stuffed pies. Now they’re rolling out that test program in over 100 locations in Arizona and California, with plans to continue expansion later this month. It’s also adding beer partners; the original test was with Anheuser-Busch, but the pizza chain has reportedly added MillerCoors as a partner in brews.

 


Congress might approve lab-grown meat regulation
Quartz reported that a proposed spending bill approved by a congressional subcommittee includes a provision that would give the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) the power to regulate how lab-grown meat is labeled and inspected. It’ll go next to the full, 46-member House Agriculture Committee, and, if passed, would have huge implications for a hotly-contested issue: the labeling of cultured meat.

Did we miss any interesting, thought-provoking food tech stories from the week? Tell us in the comments or tweet us @TheSpoonTech.