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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

EverCase

The Spoon Weekly: Wonder’s Big Bet, Parc’s Cold Chain Spinout, a Hard Look at Model for 15 Minute Grocery

Will Wonder Reinvent the Food Delivery Biz, or Become Another Cautionary Tale? Only Time Will Tell

Imagine you wanted to build a complete-from-scratch meal delivery company.

Not just the delivery part like Doordash. I’m talking about building a company that is essentially an entire restaurant and food delivery industry in a box, one that works with big-name chefs to develop new restaurant concepts, builds centralized food production facilities, creates a network of mini-kitchen hubs around a large metro area, and owns the delivery network to get the food to people’s doors.

In other words, everything. If that sounds like a big vision, it is, and it’s exactly what Marc Lore is building with Wonder. The founder of Jet.com and Diapers.com described the concept in a Linkedin post last December:

Our innovative, vertically-integrated approach begins with exclusive menus from the country’s best chefs and restaurants. A central commissary sources high-quality, fresh ingredients and serves as the start of each meal’s journey. Orders are then fired, finished, and plated in our mobile kitchens just steps away from your door, and served as soon as they’re ready — allowing you to experience the food the way it’s meant to be enjoyed. 

Lore is no stranger to big industry-shifting ideas. He created Diapers.com, one of the early pioneers in online baby products (acquired by Amazon), and Jet.com, a discount-pricing-based online retailer acquired by Walmart in 2016. He also has plans to build a Utopian city in the American west.

Read the full story at The Spoon. 

PARC Spinout EverCase Uses Electric & Magnetic Fields to Store Food in Freezers Without Ice Crystals

If you’ve ever put meat or fish into a freezer, you’ve probably noticed it doesn’t look nearly as fresh once you thaw it out.

That’s because the process of freezing food alters and damages its structure at a cellular level. As the temperature drops, water molecules slow down, and ice crystal embryos form ice nucleation sites. From there, the ice spreads to freeze the entire piece of food. Water within the food expands by up to 9% when frozen, causing food cells to rupture. When frozen food thaws, nutrients and flavors leach out from the food, often in the form of drip loss (that red liquid dropping from a warmed piece of red meat).

But what if you could store and preserve food in a freezer at sub-zero temperatures and avoid the damage incurred by traditional freezing? That’s the idea behind a new startup called EverCase, a spinout from storied research and business incubator Xerox PARC.

Read the full story about EverCase’s freezer tech here at The Spoon.

Delivery and Grocery Tech

The Case for 15-Minute Grocery Delivery is Questionable. So Why Did It Raise So Much Capital?

For about as long as I’ve been seriously watching the Internet industry, companies have been trying to make a business of home grocery delivery.

It started back in the late nineties when companies like Webvan and Homegrocer raised massive amounts of capital after convincing investors that food shopping would be largely done online in the future.

Webvan would raise almost $400 million in venture investing and another $375 million through an IPO. HomeGrocer raised $440 million in venture capital and almost $288 million going public.

None of it was enough. The two companies would eventually merge and went bankrupt less than a year later.

Of course, some online grocers survived, including some originating in the early days of the Internet. Ocado, conceived in the year 2000, continues to this day and is one of the biggest online grocers (and grocery automation technology companies).

But despite the occasional success story like Ocado, the reality is online grocery shopping is a tough business, one that seems to possibly work as part of a broader omnichannel market approach where grocers like Walmart, Kroger, and now, yes, Amazon offer both in-person and online shopping experiences for the consumer. And even Ocado.com is essentially an omnichannel model, partnering in the early days with Waitrose.

Which brings us to the 15-minute grocery category, a model built around hyper-local delivery with distributed micro-fulfillment centers placed in dense urban markets like NYC, Philadelphia, and other locations. Startups in this space focus on convenience, offering a limited set of items, not unlike you might find in a convenience store like 7-Eleven (but usually with a little more fresh food sprinkled into the mix).

You can read the full story about 15-Minute Grocery’s questionable business model here at The Spoon. 

Food Media

Is Roku About To Bring Us Shoppable TV Content Featuring Martha Stewart & Other Culinary Giants?

Last week, Walmart and Roku announced a deal that would allow TV viewers watching streaming via a Roku device to purchase items – including food items – using their remote.

According to the announcement, the new experience will allow customers to click on and purchase items advertised within the “moments of entertainment” (translation: during an actual show and not an explicit commercial), as well as during commercial breaks during ad-supported programming.

The new integration will allow viewers to click on a shoppable ad and proceed to checkout. The customer’s payment information will be pre-populated from Roku Pay, Roku’s payments platform, and then the customer taps “OK” on the Walmart checkout page to place the order. A Walmart purchase confirmation is emailed to the customer.

By taking shoppable commerce to the TV screen, Walmart is going beyond the shoppable integrations the company has previously done through partnerships with SideChef and Tasty. While the rise of video-centric social media platforms is blurring the lines, TV watching (including streaming) typically is a much different experience than time spent in front of our computers doing activities like online shopping.

Read the full story here.

Future Food

Coming Out of Stealth, Paleo Unveils Six Animal-Free, GMO-Free Varieties of Heme

In 2024, imagine walking into Burger King and ordering a mammoth burger. No, not one that is bigger than your head; this Whopper will taste like the extinct proboscideans that roamed the earth millions of years ago. It’s all part of the magic from a Belgium-based food ingredient company called Paleo.

After two years, Paleo has come out of stealth mode to announce its technology to bring the authentic taste and aroma of meat and fish to plant-based meat and fish alternatives with a non-GMO, animal-free heme. As part of that announcement, the World International Property Organization has published Paleo’s patent application, finally allowing Paleo to share details of its precision fermentation technology. 

Hermes Sanctorum, CEO and co-founder of Paleo: “When we set out to create the ultimate animal-free meat or fish experience, we quickly zeroed in on heme. Without exaggeration, we can say that we cracked the code of heme, allowing us to produce GMO-free heme that’s bio-identical to the most popular meats and tuna – as well as mammoth.”

Read the full post here at The Spoon.

Podcast: A Conversation With Good Food Institute’s Bruce Friedrich

If you work in the alt-protein industry or even just interested in the space, chances are you know about the Good Food Institute.

In this episode, we catch up with GFI’s CEO and founder Bruce Friedrich to talk about everything alt-protein and the future of meat.

Some of the topics we cover in this podcast include:

  • The current state of alt-protein sales
  • Why plant-based meat sales plateaued in 2021
  • The need for investment in alt-protein infrastructure
  • The politics of alternative meat
  • When will cultivated meat get regulatory approval for retail sale in the US
  • The need for affirmative messaging around alt-proteins

You can listen to the full episode below by clicking play or, as always, find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Food & Web3

From the Paneraverse to the Wendyverse, the Food Web3 Trademark Gold Rush is On

While it’s uncertain at this point just how profitable the food industry’s efforts to build out a presence in the metaverse will be, what we do know is those sure to make out in the near term around all these food web3 initiatives are trademark attorneys.

All anyone has to do is make a casual search of the USPTO’s trademark database or check out trademark Twitter (there’s a Twitter for everything) to see that there’s been a rush by food brands to file web3-related trademarks to ensure they have their place reserved in the metaverse for whenever they’re ready to make a trip.

Coverage of these filings in the crypto-press is often templatized, usually featuring tweets from one of a couple of trademark attorneys making a name for themselves on crypto twitter by talking about different trademark filings. Whether it’s Snickers or Chuck E. Cheese or Panda Express or you name it, the stories generally tell us these brands are set to enter or headed to or already have entered the metaverse.

To read the full story, click here!

PARC Spinout EverCase Uses Electric & Magnetic Fields to Store Food in Freezers Without Ice Crystals

If you’ve ever put meat or fish into a freezer, you’ve probably noticed it doesn’t look nearly as fresh once you thaw it out.

That’s because the process of freezing food alters and damages its structure at a cellular level. As the temperature drops, water molecules slow down, and ice crystal embryos form ice nucleation sites. From there, the ice spreads to freeze the entire piece of food. Water within the food expands by up to 9% when frozen, causing food cells to rupture. When frozen food thaws, nutrients and flavors leach out from the food, often in the form of drip loss (that red liquid dropping from a warmed piece of red meat).

But what if you could store and preserve food in a freezer at sub-zero temperatures and avoid the damage incurred by traditional freezing? That’s the idea behind a new startup called EverCase, a spinout from storied research and business incubator Xerox PARC.

The new company, announced on June 15th, is the result of almost a decade of research that started when Dr. Soojin Jun, a professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, got a three-year research grant from the USDA in 2013 to research the technology dubbed “Supercooling.”

Jun’s Supercooling technology utilizes pulsed electric and oscillating magnetic fields to cause water molecules within food stored at sub-zero temperature to vibrate, inhibiting the formation of ice crystals. The result is food that, when pulled out of a Supercool equipped freezer, has almost the exact look and texture of food that is fresh and not riddled with ice crystals.

Image Above – Left: Drip Loss from thawed traditionally frozen meat. Right: EverCase’s comparison of meat using different preservation techniques

Jun would eventually take his ideas to Xerox PARC where he would get help incubating them and preparing them for commercialization. The end result of that move is EverCase, a new spinout that plans to build systems with Supercooling that can be used in existing freezers.

You can watch a demo in the video below where EverCase shows a piece of frozen meat compared with a piece of meat stored using Supercooling technology.

EverCase Demo Video

The company is pitching nothing less than a revamp of the traditional “cold chain” supply network, where freezers, from packers to the retail storefront (and possibly even to the home), use Supercooling technology. The company’s pitch deck talks of a new category of smart packaging and a new preserved food category of ‘Supercooled foods.’ They also plan to work with refrigeration manufacturers and other OEMs to build Supercooling technology into freezers and refrigerators.

It’s an ambitious plan, but there’s no doubt there could be a market for technology that helps food sidestep some of the downsides of traditional cold chain freezer technology. The company does say its technology is “inexpensive to make,” but it’s still unclear to me what the total cost of upgrades for a restaurant, retailer, or food packer would be. Nevertheless, it is encouraging that EverCase says its technology works with existing freezers because forklift upgrades for the massive amount of installed freezer systems throughout a mature cold-chain network is a non-starter.

The company is headed up by Chris Somogyi, a former co-founder of cell-cultured seafood startup BlueNalu and business development exec at PARC, and other executives from IBM, Xinova, and PARC. According to the announcement, EverCase is in the process of a Series A funding round.