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Beyond Meat Deal Expands its China Footprint with KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell

Yum China Holdings announced a deal yesterday to bring Beyond Meat’s plant-based burgers to select KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell stores in mainland China for a limited time this month. The move expands Beyond’s presence in China, which has been a priority for the company.

As part of the deal, KFC and Pizza Hut will both offer the Beyond Burger, while the Taco Bell locations will offer a taco made with Beyond meat. All three restaurants are offering the plant-based alternatives for just a limited time.

The Yum deal follows a similar partnership Beyond announced in April, when Starbucks in China added three dishes made with Beyond’s meat product. Beyond has a particular focus on Asia and has a goal of producing its plant-based burgers in the region before the end of this year.

All of these QSR deals help Beyond establish a foothold in China before its rival, Impossible Foods has a chance to do the same. China is something of a holy grail for plant-based meat companies. As we explained last year:

  • China has the largest population in the world
  • China produces the most meat in the world
  • China consumes the most meat in the world, and its hunger for protein is growing

Additionally, pork is the most consumed meat in Asia, and earlier this year Impossible debuted its plant-based pork product at CES.

We can expect to see Beyond make more deals like the Yum one in the coming months. And for it’s part, Impossible has been ramping up production and its retail presence here in the U.S. over the past year, and seems to be prepping a direct to consumer sales channel.

Plant-based meal sales were already skyrocketing, and that trend isn’t likely to ease up as the COVID-19 pandemic has raised new questions about the health and safety of eating animal-based meat. The business of faux burgers is very much real.

Smart Oven & Food Delivery Startup Tovala Raises $20 Million Series B To Fund Growth

Tovala, the Chicago-based smart oven and meal-delivery startup, announced today it has raised a $20 million in Series B funding.

The round, led by agrifood venture capital firm Finistere Ventures, follows $9 million in Series A funding, bringing the company’s total funding close to $40 million.

It’s an interesting time for Tovala to raise such an impressive B round, coming during a pandemic where many venture firms have refocused their efforts on stabilizing existing portfolio investments and large corporate investment arms have either dialed back or outright eliminated venture initiatives.

But while the pandemic has chilled many industries, Tovala has only seen business accelerate the last few months in part due to its position at the intersection of two markets benefitting from quarantine-induced cooking: countertop home cooking appliances and home food delivery.

As we’ve noted here at the Spoon, the combination of stay-at-home orders and restaurant dine-in shutdowns led to an explosion in home cooking activity, which led to countertop home cooking equipment sales growth that was at multiples of normal industry volumes.

But according to Rabie, who I caught up with last week to discuss their latest funding, while Tovala has experienced strong growth during the pandemic, their business had actually started taking off in the second half of 2019.

“The business has been growing really fast for nearly a year now,” said Rabie. “The investors took comfort in the fact that this wasn’t a COVID trend where our business took off and might go away when normalcy returns, but actually the opposite. Business was booming pre-COVID, COVID accelerated that growth, and we believe it will accelerate adoption after COVID as people build new habits.”

Since Tovala started shipping a few years ago, I asked him why business took off last year. According to Rabie, the main difference is they changed how they talked about the product with their customers.

“We went through this exercise over the first half of 2019 to rebrand the company and better speak to our core customer,” said Rabie. “If you come to our website today versus a year ago, it looks like night and day, it’s different messaging, different photography, different videography, different user experience, same core product, just marketed differently.”

After Rabie and Tovala spent time talking to their key customers who used the Tovala multiple times per week, they realized the company’s value was in helping to solve the problem of weeknight dinner. They also realized they weren’t an oven company so much as a service company.

“The oven is the vehicle to access that food but most of our customers are not really in the market for an oven. It was kind of a lightbulb moment.”

After the rebrand, the company has seen an increase in annualized revenue of 300 percent since September of last year. In some ways, Tovala has been the little smart kitchen company that could, continuing to grow and raising more funding as other, more high profile companies, have struggled.

I asked Rabie why Tovala has succeeded when others haven’t.

“A lot of companies haven’t made it and I think there’s a lot of reasons why,” said Rabie. “The first reason is (you need to be) super clear on the problem you’re solving and making sure it’s a real problem.”

He also said that while he thinks a recurring revenue business is necessary nowadays, it can’t just be an afterthought.

“Whatever that subscription component is, it has to be inherent to the product and it has to make a lot of sense.”

Tovala plans to use the new funding round to increase staff, expand production capabilities and fuel growth. And while Rabie indicated they will build on top of their current technology, he made it clear the funding won’t largely be sunk into developing a next-generation oven.

Makes sense for an oven company that isn’t really an oven company.

NPD: Restaurant Chain Transactions Down From Last Year, Digital Orders Up

New data from NPD Group is a real good news/bad news situation for restaurants. The bad news: for the week ending May 24, total major restaurant chain transactions declined 18 percent compared to the same time period last year. The good news? That’s up 25 percentage points from the biggest decline in transactions during this pandemic (-43 percent for the week ending April 12).

Of course, a big reason for that growth is that more cities and states began re-opening towards the end of May, so more people could once again actually go into a restaurant.

An NPD press release breaks the numbers down further, writing:

  • Major full service chain restaurant transactions declined by -42% versus same time year ago, a +7 point improvement from the prior week’s decline of -49% from year ago.
  • Transactions at quick service restaurant chains were down -17% in week ending May 24 compared to same week year ago, improving from the -20% decline in the prior week.

Another couple of interesting tid-bits from NPD’s recent data is that drive-thru, mostly at QSRs, made up almost half of all restaurant occasions, and that digital orders grew by 106 percent in April compared with last year. NPD says that digital orders now account for 20 percent of all restaurant occasions.

If you’ve been following my colleague Jenn Marston’s writing, this growth in digital orders and off-premises dining shouldn’t come as a surprise. In her excellent weekly restaurant tech newsletter this past Friday, she covered recent Black Box data that showed takeout orders are going back up. As Jenn wrote:

Presumably, people got excited about going back to restaurants instead of ordering takeout, then realized what a pain in the a$$ dine-in service is going to be for a long time to come. Guidelines vary from state to state in the U.S., but almost all of them include reduced capacity, reduced party sizes, no buffets, and in some cases a mask requirement. Add to that the trepidation most of us wear with our masks these days anytime we set foot in public, and it’s not exactly a recipe for a packed house.

As more cities and states ease shelter in place order, and summer gets into full swing, we’ll move from guessing about how consumers will react to restaurants’ re-opening and into hard numbers around what they are actually doing. Data like this from NPD helps chart those movements.

Now is the Time to Add Gesture Control to Self-Serve Kiosks

Self-serve kiosks could be one bit of technology used to help restaurants re-open. Switching to kiosks can help eliminate ordering from a worker behind a counter and thereby reducing human-to-human contact.

But the problem with a lot of kiosks is that they still require people to use a touchscreen when it comes to browsing a menu and ordering food. Those touchscreens are, well, touched by a lot of hands throughout the day. This will mean that restaurants will need to not only clean the screens on a regular basis, but make sure those sanitation efforts are on display so customers know the kiosks are clean.

One feature that could help mitigate any concerns over using public kiosks is gesture tech — that is, the ability to wave and swipe your hands in front of a device without actually touching it to activate it.

More than just waving your hand under a faucet to get it to run, gesture controls have been around for a long time. Check out this demo of gesture control via Kinect on the Microsoft Xbox from 2014. It shows how you can scroll and select on-screen objects with your hand while never actually touching the screen. My recollection of using the system back then was that it was pretty clunky, but advancements in computing power, computer vision and even AI have assuredly resolved those issues.

You can start to see some of this contactless tech with PopID, which makes kiosks that let you pay with your face. Obviously, as with any facial recognition, there are privacy concerns. But, rightly or wrongly, those more abstract concerns could get set aside because people who don’t want to physically interact with a public machine and insert their credit card.

Obviously, an easier solution would be to skip the kiosk altogether and just have people use their phone to order. In that way, the only object they touch is their own. That is true, but not everybody has a smartphone. Also, while people may download apps for big companies they frequent like Starbucks or McDonald’s, they won’t download an app for every single restaurant they visit. Plus, mobile apps are expensive to build and not every mom and pop restaurant can afford to make them.

We are just starting to figure out what people want from restaurant interactions. Perhaps they will be fine with ordering from an actual person wearing a mask and all of this is for naught. But if the virus doesn’t go away or rebounds in a meaningful way, we could all be waving hello to gesture controlled kiosks.

Revention Rebrands as HungerRush, Launches Off-Premises Enhancements

Restaurant tech company Revention has rebranded as HungerRush and announced a new set of features aimed at helping restaurants fulfill off-premises orders. According to a tip sent to The Spoon, new products include contactless delivery capabilities, driver tracking, and integration with third-party delivery services.

HungerRush’s focus on digital ordering and off-premises orders isn’t completely new. As Revention, the restaurant management platform already included integration with some delivery companies, mobile and online ordering, and the ability to manage customer loyalty programs. 

The new features are mostly enhancements to existing products. HungerRush Drive lets restaurant operators track drivers as they deliver orders, which is becoming a more common practice nowadays. There is also messaging system for curbside pickup orders, where customers can notify the restaurant when they arrive, as well as the addition of more integrations with third-party delivery services, including Postmates, Grubhub, and “hundreds more,” according to today’s press release.

HungerRush is rebranding and releasing these features at at time when most restaurants continue to focus on improving their digital ordering as well as the process for takeout and delivery. The pandemic forced many restaurants into the off-premises world, and though dining rooms have reopened in a lot of states, they’ve done so with reduced capacity, not to mention customer base rather wary of going out to eat. It’s pretty much assumed at this point that restaurants must continue building to-go strategies to make up for lost revenue and keep the lights on.

Many a tech company promises to help in that area. Toast, Presto, CardFree, Sevenrooms, and a boatload of others have all announced new features or product enhancements that emphasize digital ordering and contactless delivery/pickup.

How well they deliver on these promises is what will determine who has value and who’s expendable when it comes to choosing a restaurant tech platform. For example, having a system for customers to message the restaurant when they arrive for their curbside order is smart. But geofencing tech, which automatically alerts the restaurant when a customer arrives, is even more efficient. 

HungerRush is old guard when it comes to restaurant tech companies, having been founded in 2003. (It’s also very popular with pizza chains, for some reason.) Time will tell if these new enhancements to its platform will be enough to compete with the dozens of other offerings vying for dominance as the restaurant industry reinvents itself. 

Court Rules That Nestlé’s ‘Incredible’ Burger Name Infringes on Impossible

A European court ruled that Néstle must change the name of its Incredible burger because it infringes on Impossible’s trademarks, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

For now, the ruling only applies to European countries. Swiss CPG giant Néstle will change the name of its patty to Sensational Burger, which unfortunately doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily but also won’t potentially confuse customers — something the court cited in its ruling. 

According to the WSJ, Impossible claimed Nestlé was “trying to impede” its entry into the European market by using a similar name for its product.

A spokesperson for Néstle said that they believe “anyone should be able to use descriptive terms such as ‘incredible’ to explain the qualities of a product.” The company is planning to appeal the decision.

Néstle launched its Incredible meatless patty last year under its Garden Gourmet brand. The burger is made of soy and wheat protein and meat to compete with the new wave of plant-based meat companies, namely Beyond and Impossible. As of right now, Nestlé’s patty sells in 15 European countries as well as Australia, and in 2019 also landed in McDonald’s stores in Israel.

Impossible doesn’t actually sell its products in Europe yet. It filed with the EU in 2019 for regulatory approval. A spokesperson for the company last year told The Spoon that Impossible plans to “sell plant-based meat in every single region of the world.” That said, one of the hangups with Impossible getting its products in Europe is the company’s use of soy hemoglobin in its products, which is the molecule that gives the patties their “bleeding” flavor and appearance. As Catherine Lamb noted last year:

While technically heme isn’t genetically modified — it’s the output of genetically modified yeast — it could still throw up some red flags for the European Food Safety Authority.

Plant-based meat’s other major player, Beyond Meat, announced a new manufacturing facility in The Netherlands last year, and more recently said it would increase availability and speed for getting its products around Europe and the Middle East.

All of which is to say, the fight over Nestlés naming underscores how competitive the plant-based meat market has gotten recently. Even if Nestlé successfully appeals the court’s decision, the company has its work cut out in terms of carving out a dominant spot in the European alt-protein market.

 

Mixfit Debuts Its Second Generation Personalized Nutrition Device. Will Consumers Buy It?

Here at The Spoon, we’re big believers that personalized food and nutrition are going to be a big deal someday, so much so we had a conference on the subject in the ‘before times’ when people still gathered in large groups.

One of the big ideas we discussed at Customize, our food personalization summit, was how what we eat will eventually go from one-size-fits-all food to meals made specifically for each of our specific dietary and biological profiles.

This idea has already arrived in some ways in the form of 3D printed vitamins and DNA-driven diet plans, but products that make on-demand food tailored for our specific biomarkers and nutrition profiles at the point of consumption are still in their embryonic stages.

That said, one company by the name of Mixfit has been working on exactly this for the last few years. Mixfit makes a system that whips up personalized vitamin-packed beverages customized around a person’s nutrition profile as well as data from wearables or even photos they’ve taken of food on a given day.

The device works like this: It uses an app called MINA, where a user enters their nutrition profile and connects to wearables like Apple Watch for activity data. All of this information is then used to create a custom beverage recipe. When a customer wants a drink, they send their drink order to the Mixfit, which dispenses a mix of vitamins and flavors from different various pods in the form of a personalized beverage.

The company is launching its second-generation system this summer. Generation two will sell for $180, and the consumables, which consist of a mix of vitamin and flavor pods, come in the form of a $59 a month subscription.

I had a chance to check out the first-gen appliance, which is no longer available for purchase, at CES in January 2019. Here’s a shot of the inner chamber where the nutrient pods are inserted.

Mixfit (Gen 1) Vitamin Pods

While new hardware is always risky, Mixfit has the backing of large nutrition conglomerate DSM, which acquired a 50% ownership stake in the company in 2018. DSM will provide the vitamin and nutrient ingredients that come as part of the consumable subscription.

Will consumers go for the Mixfit? My guess is the product makes more sense in health clubs than on kitchen counters (the company plans to sell to both). Still, there might be enough consumers among the millions of households who spend significant amounts of money on nutrition products which jump at the chance to get custom-built beverages.

The biggest challenge for Mixfit will be consumer education. It’s a nuanced product that needs to shown to consumers, and so it needs a sales channel where the product is adequately demoed. One venue could be physical retail, but selling hardware like this is new for the nutrition business, so chains like Super Supplements or Vitamin Shoppe might not know what to make of the Mixfit. Another option could be TV-based shopping networks where the product’s capabilities can be adequately demoed to prospective customers.

Long term – think a ten-year time horizon – on-demand personalized nutrition will most likely be commonplace. The question is how exactly that nutrition will be delivered. Some, like Pablos Holman, thinks much of it will be in the form of 3D printed food. Others see AI as a big part of the picture.

But before we get to that science fiction future, we need products to help push us on our way. Mixfit is one of those early products. Now we’ll just have to wait and see if consumers are ready for that first step into the future.

GrowSquares Will Personalize Your Garden With Data Science, Microbiology, Feathers

“High-tech gardening” usually brings to mind the automated indoor vertical farming devices everyone from startups to major appliance makers are pushing these days. Those are great for time-strapped folks or those who tend to just kill plants. But for people who want to keep their hands in the soil, technology in the smart garden will need to play a different role — that of assisting the human rather than automating their entire process.

NYC-based GrowSquares has found a way to leave the human element in the gardening process while still taking advantage of tech to improve the grow process. 

“We’re the opposite of automated gardening,” GrowSquares CEO Zachary Witman said over the phone last week.

The company uses data science (advanced LIDAR and location data) as well as microbiology to determine the best plants for a specific user’s space as well as the most optimal elements to include in the soil. An accompanying app then helps the user monitor the plants, though watering and feeding them are still manual tasks.

“We look at sun, wind, taxonomy of the soil. We capture those things and then using a lot of data science we create a microenvironmental profile and say, ‘Based upon this, the attributes of your space, (time of year, etc.) these are the plants that will grow best,'” Witman explained.

Users see a scoring system where plants are rated Optimal, Good, Fair, and Poor based on location data. For example, in Nashville, TN, Basil grown at my address gets a score of 93 for this time of year, which means it’s an optimal plant for growing right now. Spinach, on the other hand, just scores 51, making it a bad fit for my backyard at the moment.

The system can actually get even more granular in terms of a users’s location than just their city. Using a customer’s geo-coordinates, the company then uses data science and machine learning models to determine which plants are best for that particular user’s garden. The recommendations may or may not be the same as the person two doors down.

“We break down each individual client’s soil. Fidelity of our data showcases the difference between you and your neighbor.”

Once a user has purchased the right plants, GrowSquares sends the necessary seeds along with optimal spacing and depth and a soil formulation for your individual garden. That might include green sand, coconut husks, feather, alfalfa, or other elements the company uses to formulate soil. Meanwhile, the app also sends notifications for when it’s time to water the plants and time to harvest them.

The actual squares in which the plants grow are made of palm leaf that naturally decomposes over time. Since it’s a modular system, users can add more squares over time, and the squares can be configured to fit different environments, balconies, backyards, and rooftops among them. Since the squares decompose, they actually replenish the soil. 

Like other consumer-grade smart garden companies, GrowSquares has seen an uptick in sales thanks to the pandemic. Witman told me the company started out servicing just three cities, Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles. Because of COVID-19, demand spiked and GrowSquares went national — a decision that’s temporary stressed the supply chain. Right now, new users must reserve their GrowSquares and wait, though Witman told me it would not be too long before things return to normal. 

He was also cautious to attribute too much of the product’s popularity to the pandemic. “I think everybody has their own reason for why they want to garden,” he said. The pandemic is one, but so is a desire to eat locally or the wish to avoid industrial-scale farming companies. And for some, going out to the balcony or backyard to grab some herbs is just easier than ordering them via Whole Foods or going to the store.

In Through the Outdoors? Restaurants Hit the Pavement as They Reopen

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Not so long ago, outdoor space at a restaurant was just a nice-to-have feature some restaurants could afford to offer. Surprise surprise (not), the pandemic is changing that. With new guidelines and requirements around safety and social distancing, more restaurant experiences are moving outdoors. And it’s not just for dine-in customers, either.

This week, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced the Shared Spaces Program, which in part allows restaurants to use public space like sidewalks, whole or partial streets, and parks to fulfill restaurant pickup orders. Restaurants can apply for a permit for free, and once the city approves dine-in service for outdoor space, those areas can be used to seat customers as well.

San Francisco isn’t alone. San Jose this month approved its “al fresco plan” that will allow restaurants to use some public spaces to fulfill takeout orders and eventually hold more seating. In Rotterdam, The Netherlands, restaurants will be allowed to convert parking spaces in front of their buildings to do the same.

While these measures could help restaurants eventually boost dine-in traffic once they reopen, at present, they may actually help restaurants run smoother to-go operations. Trying to run an ad hoc takeout business is challenging for many restaurants that have previously only operated under a dine-in model. In some cases, selling to-go orders has caused outright mayhem as crowds of people gather to wait for their to-go orders and staff dart around trying to determine which meal belongs to which angry customer.

Make no mistake: there will be operational challenges using public spaces, too. In fact if it’s not managed correctly, the whole thing could become its own social-distancing disaster. Viewed through a more optimistic lens, it could provide more space for customers and delivery drivers waiting to retrieve their orders. 

And you know what would really enhance the public spaces restaurant experience? Some technology. Earlier this week, I spoke with two companies, hardware manufacturer Elo and software startup Clicksys, about a new self-service kiosk they’re trialing at a restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden. 

In summary, the idea is to have a kiosk installed into the front wall or window of a restaurant, much like a bank ATM, so that folks passing on the street can simply stroll up, order, pay, and wait for their food without having to actually enter the restaurant.

There are a lot of good use cases for this idea, and these newfound public spaces are one of them. If we’re talking about relieving operational mayhem, an automated system would cut down on the amount of people milling around in said public space. Staff would not need to man an order station, since the kiosk processes ordering and payments. And since the system texts users when their meal is ready, those customers would be able to better time their entrance and exit and not have to stand around playing the waiting game.  

The Elo-Clicksys machine is currently only available in Europe, but there are plenty of restaurant tech companies in the U.S. that should take note of this concept. Right now, front-of-house technology is having to truly prove its worth in a world without dining rooms. Self-service kiosks (with hand sanitizer next to them, please) built for the outdoor world could prove lucrative in the coming months. 

Off-Premises Sales Are Back Up

Another reason the forthcoming Shared Spaces could get a lot of use this summer: sentiment around off-premises orders is back up. Nation’s Restaurant News reports that after taking a big dip at the beginning of May, when many restaurants began to reopen dining rooms, sales of takeout orders are back up.

Restaurant analytics firm Black Box Intelligence, which provided the source material for NRN’s post, said that early in May, customers complained of long wait times for curbside pickup orders but that “guest sentiment trends have started to recover as of week-ended May 24, with off-premise sentiment returning to similar levels as were seen in April.”

Presumably, people got excited about going back to restaurants instead of ordering takeout, then realized what a pain in the a$$ dine-in service is going to be for a long time to come. Guidelines vary from state to state in the U.S., but almost all of them include reduced capacity, reduced party sizes, no buffets, and in some cases a mask requirement. Add to that the trepidation most of us wear with our masks these days anytime we set foot in public, and it’s not exactly a recipe for a packed house.

While Black Box didn’t cite the specific reason for the uptick in off-premises orders this month, my guess is that folks are still more comfortable waiting for a to-go box than eating at a sparsely populated dining room fraught with anxiety. 

DoorDash Launches an E-commerce Platform for Indie Restaurants

Ever looking to capitalize on this boost in off-premises orders, DoorDash this week announced a new e-commerce platform for independent restaurants. It’s called the DoorDash Storefront, and it’s supposed to offer restaurants a way to build out their own digital storefronts through which they can process orders and payments. Restaurant sign up with the platform and get their own website/app for takeout and delivery orders — powered, of course, by DoorDash’s system. The digital storefront also plugs into DoorDash’s fulfillment network of drivers, so the food can actually get delivered.

DoorDash is actually addressing a need here. Sophisticated mobile apps that process orders, payments, and loyalty points are expensive and complicated to build. Small restaurants and restaurant chains generally can’t afford them, which is a negative in a restaurant industry that was just forced to go almost entirely off-premises. DoorDash said in a press release that about 40 percent of its restaurant customers do not have their own e-commerce platform.

What isn’t mentioned is what the storefronts will cost the restaurants. In bold-faced text, the company’s blog post stated that restaurants “control and own the customer experience.” It does not say customers own the data — a major issue with using a third-party delivery platform — nor does it go into exactly how the restaurant owns the customer experience. However, it’s worth noting that the blog post also states that restaurants “do not pay a commission to DoorDash on orders they receive through their Storefront.” 

DoorDash has actually been less awful to restaurants than its third-party competitors during the pandemic. The company waived commission fees for a time independent restaurants when the dining room shutdowns first took place. Still, commission fees are coming back, and offering restaurants their own digital storefronts means those restaurants will be firmly locked into the DoorDash ecosystem when it’s time to pay up.

All of which is to say, read the company’s seemingly altruistic blog post with a magnifying glass in one hand and a dose of healthy skepticism in the other.   

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The Food Tech Show: Fake Nuggets & Real Goodbyes

It was a sad week at The Spoon as we said goodbye to Catherine Lamb.

Catherine is heading off to Chicago to get her MBA at Kellogg University. After that she’ll take over the world, or at least the world of food tech.

I met Catherine for the first time when she volunteered at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2017. More than one person came up to me during the conference and told me I really needed to hire this person. I interviewed her a couple weeks later and did just that.

If you want to hear the audio version of me getting sappy, you’ll have to listen to the podcast. In addition to saying goodbye to Catherine, we also discuss the following stories:

To listen, just click play below, download the podcast direct to your device, or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Food Tech News: Recipe Personalization, Curbside Pickup, and Cultured Seafood

Happy food tech news day! I hope it’s a sunny one where you are.

This week we’ve got stories on a new partnership for DNA-based personalized recipe suggestions, funding for cell-based seafood, and ALDI’s expansion of curbside grocery pickup. Enjoy!

Side note: This will be my last foodtech news dispatch for The Spoon! I’m moving on and will miss you all greatly.

GenoPalate and Edamam team up to further personalized dining
Personalized nutrition platform GenoPalate has partnered with Edamam, a nutrition data service, to make the world’s largest food and recipe database for those trying to eat a healthier diet. Through the partnership, GenoPalate customers will be able to better recommend recipes to their users, and Edamam will move “more seriously into the nutrigenomic space.” Beginning in the fall of 2020, GenoPalate members will be able to access information Edamam through both mobile and web.

ALDI to expand curbside pickup to 600 stores
Grocery chain ALDI announced this week that its Curbside Grocery Pickup service would be available in 600 stores across 35 states by the end of July. Customers shop for groceries online, select the closest location which offers curbside pickup, and choose a time for pickup. They drive into their designated parking spot and a grocery employee will put their groceries into their car. Maybe next they’ll start exploring geofencing?

Photo: BlueNalu

Sumitomo Corporation of America invests in BlueNalu
Sumitomo Corporation of Americas (SCOA) has joined the Series A financing round for ‘cellular aquaculture’ company BlueNalu. The startup, which makes cultured seafood from fish cells, announced a $20 million Series A round back in February of this year. SCOA will help BlueNalu expand its production capacity and create global distribution partnerships.

With Ella, Crown Coffee is Transparent About its Robot Barista Ambitions

I know I should probably be more focused on the robot part of Crown Coffee’s “Ella.” Ella is, after all, a robot barista. But watching a video of Ella in action that the company posted to Linkedin, I can’t stop staring at the machine’s screen. It’s transparent but still displays messages about orders. The words just float in front of the articulating arm that swirls around making coffee.

That transparent OLED screen is made by LG, but as Crown Digital IO Founder and CEO Keith Tan told me by phone this week “It was just a prototype. LG wasn’t even selling them.” Somehow, Tan convinced LG to give him a pre-production version of the display, to which Crown added touch capabilities.

Based in Singapore, Crown Coffee started off in 2016 as a regular chain of human-powered cafes before Tan got the idea to add robotics into the service mix last year. Ella comes in three different sizes and can serve a variety of coffee, tea and iced drinks. It also makes up to 200 coffees per hour. Drinks can be ordered and paid for via touchscreen on the machine or with a mobile app.

So far, Ella has just one installation in Singapore and has made a number of appearances serving coffee at large events.

Ella joins the ranks of other robot baristas around the world including Briggo, Cafe X, TrueBird, MontyCafe, Rozum Cafe and Fibbee. They all offer the same basic value proposition: good coffee served quickly in high-traffic areas. But in the age of COVID-19, Ella, and all of the robot baristas also offer something more appealing than a faster latte. They offer a contactless way to get your morning joe.

Robots, as I’ve been repeating for the past couple of months, don’t get sick. In an age of social distancing and facemasks, that lack of human touch could be appealing to a global population that has watched a viral outbreak sicken and take so many lives.

Crown Coffee is currently bootstrapped, and the company plans to both own and operate its machines as well as lease them out with a rev-share to outside locations. Like other robot barista companies, Crown Coffee is targeting high-volume areas like airports and train stations.

Unlike a lot of its competitors, Tan says that coffee is just the beginning. “All this groundwork will evolve Ella into other use cases like food,” Tan said. “The lowest hanging fruit is coffee, tea and soft serve.”

While there is a lot of competition in the robo-barista world, it’s still pretty spread out around the world. Given the small footprint of each of these machines, and how many people love their java, the automated coffee space doesn’t have to be a zero sum game.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching out for Ella, and then watching that screen.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post inaccurately stated that LG added the touch capabilities to the screen. This technology was added by Crown. We regret the error.