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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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PAR Acquires Guest Loyalty Platform Punchh for $500M

Restaurant tech provider PAR Technology Corporation announced today it has acquired guest engagement platform Punchh for $500 million in cash and shares. The deal adds loyalty and guest engagement software to PAR’s existing arsenal of restaurant tech tools, which currently includes a wide range of hardware and software products for restaurants.

Punchh has for a long time promised to “take the guesswork out of marketing” for restaurants by helping them align their sales channels and marketing campaigns with what their customers actually want. It does this by collecting data on customers and using it to dictate the types of campaigns and promotions sent out. A high-level example of this would be sending deals on plant-based meals to vegans and never sending that group offers for burgers. Punchh, however, can get considerably more granular than this. 

To date, the company has raised $68.1 million. Its platform serves over 200 brands, including Pizza Hut, Denny’s, and El Pollo Loco.

PAR’s CEO and President Savneet Singh noted in today’s press release that integrating the Punchh platform into PAR’s existing offerings will allow restaurants to access more technology via a single system, rather than “juggling disjointed vendors,” as is fairly common nowadays. 

However, this idea of gluing together siloed technologies to run a restaurant will get increasingly harder as digital orders increase and customers demand more personalization. It follows, then, that we’ll see more deals like the PAR-Punchh one in the future as companies attempt to turn themselves into “one-stop-shop” systems for the restaurant industry. Other companies, including Square and Toast, are also building out unified restaurant management systems that are made up of hardware and software controlled from one centralized point. 

TurtleTree Scientific Partners With JSBiosciences to Develop Cell Culture Media at Commercial Scale

TurtleTree Scientific, the B2B arm of cellular ag company TurtleTree Labs, announced today a new partnership with JSBiosciences to collaborate on the development of cell culture media. The overarching goal of the partnership is to bring down the cost of production for cell-cultured products in order to eventually achieve commercial scale.

Singapore-based TurtleTree Labs is best known for its technology that produces human milk from mammalian cells. The company launched its TurtleTree Scientific arm earlier this year with the goal of creating food-grade growth factors for cultured protein products.

Finding a growth media that is accessible, affordable, and that doesn’t rely on animals to get remains one of the biggest challenges for cultured protein companies. Some companies are now trying to distance themselves from the use of the controversial fetal bovine serum (FBS), but alternatives are few and far between, not to mention wildly expensive. 

JSBiosciences is a valuable partner in this area because it already has a successful track record of developing mammalian cell culture media at a large scale. The company will provide TurtleTree with food-grade basal media and media formulation services, with the goal of getting “upstream” production costs low enough to allow for commercial-scale production of cell-cultured products, starting in Singapore.

This is the second major partnership for TurtleTree Scientific so far in 2021. Last month, the company announced a collaboration with biotech company Dyadic International. Through that partnership, the two companies are developing recombinant food-grade growth factors for proteins that can be grown in high yields at lower costs in bioreactors.