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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food delivery

Are Food Delivery Lockers the Next Must-Have Home Amenity?

Everywhere you look there are delivery lockers. Grocery stores, apartment buildings, office lobbies.

So why not at our home?

If you’re Jeremy High, the idea makes lots of sense. As a luxury home builder in the central California market of Monterey, High works closely with clients spec’ing out features customized around their lifestyles. A recurring ask he hears from his customers is they want a way to ensure that food delivered to their home is safe and kept at the right temperature.

The more he heard this, the more High wondered if a solution existed to help his customers. When he realized there wasn’t, he decided to build it himself.

High’s product, eventually called the Fresh Portal, is a food and package delivery locker built into the side of a home. It has temperature control zones for either hot or cold food and would be accessible both from the outside and inside. It would be managed by an app and integrated with third-party delivery service providers like UberEats or Amazon Fresh so they can access the outside of the locker and insert a delivery.

For High, who first thought of the idea in 2014 and filed for a patent a year later, the product needed to be installable both in new builds and retrofits. To make that possible, he designed the Fresh Portal to use an install concept similar to that of a retrofit window, where the installation process pierced the building envelope, and then the installed product is integrated with the home’s existing waterproofing.

“The design allows us to install this rapidly,” said High. “We can install this and not do any patchwork. No paint comes out. Nothing like that.”

High, who is raising money for his company, plans to have a shippable product by sometime in 2023. He estimates the pricing for the system will be $3,450 installed.

If this all sounds a little first-world problem-ish to you, it is. None of that should be surprising since High’s typical customer has enough wealth to buy a new multimillion-dollar home.

But the luxury home builder turned tech entrepreneur does have a plan to make his food delivery lockers more accessible through subsidization. One such scenario could include a Fresh Portal included as part of a food delivery subscription service. Another is one in which the Fresh Portal earns revenues from third-party delivery service providers.

“DoorDash can deliver to a First Portal versus your porch or knocking on the door and waiting,” said High. “Efficiency and the first time delivery success metric goes up because they’re delivering to a product.”

In exchange, High believes that the delivery companies would pay his company 1% of the sale if it’s delivered to a Fresh Portal. This is all in the idea stage at this point, as High has yet to strike any deals with third-party delivery companies, and I have to wonder if they’d willingly part ways with even a thin slice of their margin.

I think High has time to figure out his subsidization models later, mostly because I see the Fresh Portal as primarily a solution for new homes or remodels for the next few years. I can see the home delivery locker becoming a trendy new homebuilder amenity, where the product’s price is rolled into the monthly mortgage payment.

Longer-term – think a ten-year time horizon – I can see a future where home delivery lockers become commonplace. Like the milk box of a bygone era, only these boxes will be refrigerated, connected to the cloud, and – if you own a Fresh Portal – built into the side of your home.

The Minnow Pickup Pod

CES 2022: Minnow Shows Off Pickup Pod, an Unattended Cubby System Designed for Food Delivery

Food tech startup Minnow showed off their contactless, asynchronous smart lockers for food delivery at CES 2022 — and The Spoon got a demo and sat down to talk to CEO Steven Sperry.

Minnow began shipping the pods in the last four weeks through Hatco, a manufacturing partner who creates Minnow pods on demand. On one end of the spectrum, Hatco is serving customers where food is picked up, including restaurants, ghost kitchens, and cafeteria operators. On the other end, Minnow is focusing on selling their pods into commercial real estate including office buildings, residential spaces like apartments and condos, and college campus locations — basically, where food is delivered.

While delivery lockers aren’t a new idea, Minnow differentiates by being designed specifically for food. Each pod is insulated, lit from the inside, and includes UV lights and antimicrobial surfaces.

“We did research and found that people don’t like the idea of reaching into a dark space to get their food — they want to know that the space is clean and sterile,” said Sperry.

Not only is the Minnow pod designed for food and strong connectivity with 5G on board, it’s also providing a standardized and easier way for third-party delivery drivers to find a delivery location to drop off food without navigating secure lobbies and elevators, gated entryways or confusing campus maps.

When asked about Minnow’s support model and whether a multifamily property owner would be able to use the Minnow pod “as a service” versus a straight purchase, Sperry responded, “The purchase typically has a SAS component because the device is always connected to our servers and monitored in real-time. We monitor the food continually, we know what’s happening in every pod and in most cases, it’s considered an amenity for the residents of that building.”

The Spoon video crew was able to get a quick demo of a Minnow pod live on the CES show floor — check it out below.

CES 2022: Demo of the Minnow Pick Up Pod

Where to See Food Tech on the Show Floor @ CES 2022: Day 1

While CES 2022 will be smaller this year as the show returns to in-person after hosting an all-virtual show in 2021, we’re excited to see food tech as an official category on the show floor. The Spoon team will be in the Sands Expo in Booth 53752 talking to leaders from startups to funders and execs across agtech, robotics, future food and kitchen tech.

We’ll have videos and reports as the show goes on. To start, here’s a quick list of booths where you’ll see food tech and smart kitchen innovations and the companies behind them:

  • Bear Robotics — Booth #53755 — Bear Robotics is utilizing AI and autonomous robot technology, deploying bots to take care of everything from drink and food serving to bussing. Bear Robotics works with top chefs and restaurants, providing front of house labor support.
  • MycoTechnology — Booth #53753 — MycoTechnology harnesses the metabolic engine of mushrooms, known as mycelium, using natural fermentation to create novel ingredients that solve the food industry’s biggest challenges. (Stay tuned for a story on their consumer facing brand launching at CES.)
  • Yo-Kai Express — Booth #53758 — Yo-Kai debuted as a robotic ramen vending machine and announced a 2021 expansion into other autonomous food and cooking devices at the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.
  • Edamam — Booth #53860 — Edamam structures and organizes food and nutrition data and sells it as a subscription to businesses in the food, health, and wellness sectors. They have worked with food and retail giants include Nestle, Amazon, and The Food Network and according to the company have close to 100,000 developers using Edamam’s APIs.
  • Northfork — Booth #53959 — Northfork is a Swedish-based startup that enables shoppable recipes online, bridging the world of digital recipes and food retail.
  • Apex / “OrderHQ” Smart Food Locker — Booth #53958 — Apex Order Pickup Solutions is the creator of the OrderHQ smart food locker, a secure, contactless solution for food pickup and delivery services. The lockers combine front and back of house technology, including hot and cold storage as well as integration with fully automated order fulfilment.
  • Uvera — Booth #54058 — Uvera is a Saudi cleantech startup that wants to reduce food waste with a device that claims to increase the shelf-life of fresh food up to “97% on average within only 30 seconds of using the device, without any chemicals.”
  • Yangyoo / Armored Fresh — Booth #53761 — Yangyoo is a Korea-based food tech company launching Korea’s first vegan cheese alternative first developed by its US subsidiary, Armored Fresh. The future food brand uses a similar fermenting process that produces natural cheese on plant-based protein milk.
  • Endless West — Booth #54061 — Endless West is a beverage technology startup founded by biotechnologists using science to create a blend of wines and spirits; its first product – Glyph – is the first molecular-made whiskey, created without aging or barreling.

(Shared) Booth #51830

  • Picnic — Robotic pizza machine designed for back of house operations in restaurants; they first launched onto the scene at CES 2020 and started filling orders in the middle of 2021.
  • iUNU — iUNU (you knew) is a Seattle agtech firm creating an AI-based platform for greenhouses and vertical farms that assists indoor growers with yields, farming waste and overall operations.
  • Minnow was the winner of the 2020 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase for their contactless food delivery solution called the Minnow Pickup Pod. An IoT-enabled locker for businesses and multifamily properties, Minnow streamlines food delivery on site.

We’ll add more companies to the list as we cover news and discover additional companies! Follow us at @TheSpoonTech on Twitter and LinkedIn as well as hashtags #CES2022 and #CESFoodTech for social updates.

Mobility Service Helbiz Opens Its First Ghost Kitchen

Italian-American mobility company Helbiz announced today it is launching its own ghost kitchen/food delivery/virtual restaurant business called Helbiz Kitchens. The concept will initially be available to customers in Milan, Italy, with plans to open additional locations in the U.S. and Italy in the future.

Helbiz’ main service is operating fleets of e-scooters, e-bikes, and e-mopeds customers can rent on demand via the Helbiz app. Service is available in Italy, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, and a few other U.S. cities. 

The Milan operation of Helbiz Kitchens is housed in a 21,500-square-meter (roughly 23,000 square feet) facility and offers customers a choice of six different menus: pizza, sushi, salad, burger, and ice cream. Customers order and pay via the Helbiz app and can bundle different items from each menu into a single order and payment transaction. 

Couriers, known in the company as “Helbiz Butlers,” will deliver the food using the company’s own electric scooters, which makes sense, given how many of these it currently has in Milan and other cities. The setup is similar in some ways to DoorDash Kitchens, a ghost kitchen operation in Northern California that uses DoorDash couriers to deliver meals to customers from Chick-fil-A and other restaurant chains. Crave Collective, a ghost kitchen/virtual food hall based in Boise, Idaho, also employs its own fleet, despite never having pre-existing mobility infrastructure like DoorDash and Helbiz.

Unlike the other two concepts, however, Helbiz’ food concepts are entirely in-house creations and its team of chefs is entirely employed by the company, not a third-party restaurant. The company’s tech stack, which will power everything from online ordering for consumers to fire times in the kitchen and driver tracking, is also the product of an in-house IT team. 

Part of this focus on keeping things in-house is related to economic recovery. Like most other places, Italy’s economy suffered greatly during the pandemic and is now slowly trying to rebuild. Helbiz says its new ghost kitchen operation will provide 80 new jobs for this first location in Italy, with more to come as the concept expands to other parts of the country.

Service will initially be available, as of today, from 11:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Additional locations are planned for Washington D.C. and other cities in Italy in the future. 

Indian Food Delivery Startup Swiggy Raises $800 Million

India-based food delivery startup, Swiggy, has raised an addition $800 million in funding, The Economic Times reported today. The round was led by Falcon Edge, Amansa Capital, Think Investments, Carmignac and Goldman Sachs, with participation from new investment from sovereign wealth funds Qatar Investment Authority and GIC of Singapore. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Swiggy to roughly $2.4 billion.

India went on a severe national lockdown during the pandemic last year and Swiggy reportedly saw its daily business drop to processing fewer than one million orders a day, down from three million prior to the pandemic. The strict measures forced Swiggy to cut more than 2,000 jobs and scale back on its ghost kitchen ambitions.

But the Economic Times writes that food delivery was designated an essential service by the Indian government and that since then, both Swiggy, and its rival, Zomato have rebounded. Each company recorded their highest levels of business on December 31.

In an internal email sent out to the company (and viewed by The Economic Times) announcing the new funding, Swiggy Co-Founder and CEO, Sriharsha Majety wrote:

The fundraise gives us a lot more firepower than the planned investments for our current business lines. Given our unfettered ambition though, we will continue to seed/experiment new offerings for the future that may be ready for investments later.

With its new funding, Swiggy is now valued at $5 billion. The fundraise and new valuation come as Zomato, which is valued at $5.5 billion is prepping to go public later this year.

GrubMarket Raises $90M to Make Its Food Delivery Service Available Nationwide

Virtual food marketplace GrubMarket announced today it has raised $90 million in an oversubscribed Series D round, up from $60 million when the round was first announced in October 2020. Participants include “funds and accounts” managed by BlackRock, ACE & Company, Celtic House Venture Partners, Sixty Degree Capital, The Strand Partners, Reimagined Ventures, Trinity Capital Investment, Madison Bay Capital Partners, Marubeni Ventures, GGV and others.

GrubMarket connects consumers with farmers via an extensive online marketplace where customers can shop for grocery items and some household goods. GrubMarket also has a B2B component through which it sells wholesale goods to grocery retailers, restaurants, corporate offices, and other business settings. The company counts Whole Foods, Kroger, Hello Fresh, Blue Apron, and many other companies among its customers.

Meanwhile, its WholesaleWare platform, which is a software platform food companies can use to manage their businesses. That includes anything from inventory and financial management to HR tasks and driver routing.

Mike Xu, GrubMarket’s CEO, said in a statement that the Series D round was originally intended to be no more than $30 million, and that the company has made “efforts to keep this round $100 million.” He said the new capital will allow the company to invest more in talent, technology, and acquisitions in the future. The company also plans to “expand to most regions of the country” over the next 12 months. In October of 2020, Xu said his company plans to go public, but did not give an exact timeframe for an IPO.   

Online grocery as a category is expected to account for 21.5 percent of all grocery sales by 2025, and companies currently offer all manner of takes on the concept. Right now that includes big-box retailers like Walmart, those like Rosie that are focused on independent grocers, and those like Imperfect Foods, which cater to specific niches of the buying public. GrubMarket’s “farm-to-pantry” approach certainly serves a demand, since buying direct from farms has increased among consumers.

But Grubmarket’s focus more and more appears to be on reinventing the supply chain and doing away with some of the inefficiencies there, hence the WholesaleWare platform and the growing B2B customer base. Expect that portion of the business to grow substantially from the new infusion of capital. 

Sunbasket Transitions from Meal Kit Player to ‘Full-Service Meal Delivery Company’

Sunbasket, best known for its meal-kit subscription service, announced today it is broadening its product line and evolving to become “a full-service food delivery company.” The newly revamped service will offer a range of different food items to consumers, from full meals to snacks and pantry staples.

Reaching more potential customers, including those who need something more convenient than a full-on meal kit, seems to be at the heart of this transition. “The onset of COVID-19 forced consumers to quickly adopt new habits when it came to food, and Sunbasket was inspired to reflect on our company’s values to better serve our customers,” said Don Barnett, CEO, Sunbasket, said in a statement. Barnett added that he believes the company’s “refreshed emphasis on convenience will be appealing to even more people.”

To that end, the Sunbasket site now carries a mix of meal kits, heat-and-serve meals, meats (plant-based and traditional), dairy products, pantry staples, and snacks.

What is not completely clear from Sunbasket’s revamped website is whether a user still has to sign up for a subscription in order to get the pantry staples. From the looks of it, you would still need to sign up for a meal plan (either a meal kit or the heat-and-serve option), at which point you could add other staples onto your existing order. As has always been the case with Sunbasket, the commitment is month to month.

Today may be the official announcement for Sunbasket’s expanded roster of foods, but the company has dropped hints of such a transition for some time. In 2019, it expanded its dinner-only lineup to include breakfast and lunch meals, as well as add ons like granola butter and single-serving snacks.

And while the traditional meal kit is seeing some resurgence because of the pandemic (everyone’s eating at home), the sector’s ongoing struggles are well-documented. Most meal kit companies, including Kroger-owned HomeChef, Purple Carrot, and Blue Apron, have added a wider variety of food items as well as some customization features.

Sunbasket’s move to offer grocery items is a first in the meal kit sector, but it’s one of many examples of previously narrowly focused food companies expanding to incorporate online grocery into their wares. Misfits Market and Imperfect Foods, both companies that originally focused on rescuing cosmetically “ugly” fruits and veggies, have since expanded their services to include online marketplaces where all manner of pantry goods and food supplies can be bought. As a meal kit company, Sunbasket’s core business differs from these two companies, but it’s newly announced expansion appears to be similar.

With online grocery shopping expected to hit $250 billion and account for 21.5 percent of all grocery sales by 2025, it wouldn’t be surprising if other meal kit companies soon follow Sunbasket’s lead.

India: Potful Fights Plastic Waste By Delivering Biryanis in Handmade Clay Pots

We’re always on the lookout for companies that combat plastic waste in unique ways. Zero Grocer offers plastic-free grocery shopping. Dishcraft is working on reusable takeout containers. Planeteer makes cutlery you can eat.

Over in India, a food delivery startup called Potful is showing its love for mother earth with actual earthenware. Potful cooks and delivers Biryanis in handmade clay pots. Order a meal, keep the pot, and Poftul even includes coriander seeds with orders so the pots can be turned into planters. The Biryanis are cooked to order and cost between 560 – 660 Rupees (~ $7.59 – $9.00 USD).

The company started a few years back in Bangalore and recently launched in the Hyderabad area of India. This approach to sustainable food delivery was intriguing, so I reached out to Lokesh Krishnan, Founder and CEO of Potful. Our emailed Q&A is below and has been slightly edited for clarity.

The Spoon: Can you please explain what a biryani is?
Lokesh Krishnan: Biryani is a mixed rice dish with its origins among the Indian subcontinent. It is made with Indian spices, rice, and meat, or vegetables and sometimes, in addition, eggs and/or potatoes in certain regional varieties. Biryani is popular throughout the Indian subcontinent, as well as among its diaspora. It’s a Persian dish and Mughals brought the recipe to India centuries ago. 

The beauty of the dish is it’s a meal in itself, very balanced (has carbs, proteins and fat) and affordable. Everyone in South Asia loves it irrespective of age, income groups. 

You are cooking and delivering biryanis in the same clay pot. How does this impact your ability to grow? 
Cooking biryani in claypot method is the most traditional and authentic way of cooking biryanis. The process is know as ‘Dum Cooking” and when you do, the flavours are intact and every grain of rice would taste different compared to any other form of cooking. We have built a time and weight based process using technology and have de-skilled the entire cooking process to scale rapidly. so scaling / growing is not an issue at all. 

How often would a typical person order a biryani? I’m just wondering about clay pots stacking up around the home.
There are markets where people order every single day but most will order at 3-4 times a month. People are very familiar with the dish and hence when they are not sure of something, the first thing which comes on their mind is biryani. Its the No. 1 online ordered dish in India today on any online food aggregator platforms. 

When did you launch, and are there any numbers you can share, such as order growth?
We launched our operation in Aug 2017 in Bangalore, the silicon valley of India. We operate under cloud / dark kitchen model and have 15 kitchens in the city as of now. We have just launched the product in Hyderabad (south of India) which is the mecca for Biryanis in India and our vision is to build world’s largest biryani company and put this dish on global platform. 

Can you expand this model to other foods?
Yes you can. But we would like to stay focused on biryanis for now. 

Anything else you think I should know?
While we make authentic biryanis through this process, it’s also important to see how we are doing this business. It’s about sustainability. We don’t use plastics. It’s about responsibility. The claypots are made in hand by artisans and hence as we grow it supports the livelihood of these people. We also send seeds with every biryani and encourage the consumers to reuse the pots and grow vegetables at home or even paint it and use it to decorate your home and garden. In addition, the food cooked in earthen pot is much more healthier than any other form of cooking because of the heat exchange. 

Everytable Raises $16M to Fight Food Insecurity With Delivery

Social-enterprise-meets-restaurant-business Everytable announced this week it had closed a $16 million Series B funding round to continue its fight against food insecurity. The round was led by Creadev with participation from Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Candide Group, Gratitude Railroad Ventures, Desert Bloom Food Ventures, and Kimball Musk. This round brings Everytable’s total funding to $18.5 million. 

Company founder Sam Polk started Everytable in 2015, after leaving Wall Street, with the idea of selling grab-and-go meals priced according to the neighborhoods in which they were sold. Everytable’s main mission was — and still is — to make nutritious meals accessible to everyone, regardless of their socio-economic bracket.

The Los Angeles-based company has since added a meal subscription service where users choose meals from a rotating menu. Everytable chefs prep the food in a central commissary kitchen, while the company’s delivery team delivers the food. Like grab-and-go items, meals are priced according to the area in which they are headed, so that affluent customers will pay a little more than those facing food insecurity.

Customers an also get meals from a number of Everytable’s own brick-and-mortar stores around Los Angeles.

That food insecurity affects one in eight Americans, according to data from Feeding America. Unsurprisingly, this lack of access to nutritious food has become an even more urgent issue since the pandemic hit. In response, and in addition to its retail efforts, Everytable has also been delivering meals to those most in need, including homebound elderly people, the homeless, and community college students who would ordinarily rely on their schools’ meal plans. The company said in today’s press release it has donated more than 4 million meals to Los Angeles residents, which has also led to the company’s scaling production from about 30,000 meals per week to 180,000.

Everytable says the new funding will help it expand throughout Southern California via new grab-and-go stores, partnerships with institutional foodservice outlets, and new postal codes eligible for the company’s subscription service.

For the holidays, the company is also currently running its Pay It Forward program, done in partnership with YWCA Greater Los Angeles and Genesis Motors, both of whom will match donations. Individuals can donate a meal for $6.50 or a care package with five meals for $29.00. The cost of delivering the food is included in the donation. 

Updated: Kiwibot Partners with Sodexo to Roll Out Delivery Robots at the University of Denver

UPDATE: Some details of this story changed after we published this story:

  • The service is now launching in October. 
  • The delivery fee will start at $2.50, or it will be free with a monthly subscription.
  • Delivery will be available from a total of three restaurants.

Original post follows:

Kiwibot announced today that it has partnered with foodservice company Sodexo to bring robot food delivery to students, faculty and staff at the University of Denver.

Starting today, a fleet of 15 Kiwibots will be available to deliver food from Monday to Friday between the hours of 8 a.m and 6 p.m., with deliveries costing a flat $2.50 per order. Delivery will start with one campus restaurant before expanding to four more food options by mid-October. Kiwibot is also working with the city of Denver to enable off-campus deliveries at some point in October, as well.

There are a few things worth noting about this deal. First, this is Kiwi’s second bite at the apple when it comes to college delivery. Last year, the company delivered to UC Berkeley and had big plans to expand to a number of different schools across the U.S. Those plans never came to fruition, however and were abandoned. One reason that growth might not have happened last year was that Kiwibot was going through student groups, and not partnering with a school’s administration.

This time around, Kiwibot has partnered with Sodexo, a huge company that provides foodservice to colleges across the U.S. This partnership brings with it more legitimacy for Kiwibot, and also provides an entrée, so to speak, with college administrations and restaurants at potential campuses.

That Kiwibot has partnered with Sodexo is in itself interesting because Sodexo has an existing partnership with Kiwi rival, Starship, for robot deliveries on various colleges like George Mason University. The difference, however, is that Starship’s program requires users to download the Starship app. Kiwibot’s solution is more of a B2B play, and will integrate with a food ordering app from Sodexo. So it could provide Kiwibot with direct access to a greater number of Sodexo-run properties, should the partnership grow.

Kiwibot have been on a bit of a, err, roll lately. In July the company launched a restaurant delivery program in the city of San Jose, CA. Kiwibot is also in the middle of an equity crowdfunding campaign, which aims to raise $1 million.

Soggy Food Sucks Re-Brands as SavrPak, Starts Scaling Up

When Soggy Food Sucks won the Startup Showcase at our 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, you could kinda tell that its moniker wasn’t long for this world. Like the name of some local indie band, Soggy Food Sucks caught your attention and told you exactly what it does, but didn’t exactly scream big enterprise business.

Well today, the company announced a re-branding. Soggy Food Sucks is now the much more professional sounding SavrPak.

“I named the company myself, when it was just me,” Bill Birgen, Founder of Soggy Food Sucks SavrPak told me by phone this week. But the name became a potential issue when talking with prospective high-profile, family-friendly brands who were hesitant about partnering with anything that “sucks.”

For those unfamiliar with the company, SavrPak makes a patch that sticks to the inside of food containers and absorbs moisture. The result, the company promises is, well, no more soggy food when you order delivery.

Birgen said that the COVID-19 pandemic has been a bit of a double-edge sword for the company. On the one hand, delivery and off-premises eating is more important to restaurant business than ever. But on the other hand, restaurants, whose margins were already thin before the pandemic, are reluctant to add any new expenses like a patch for to-go containers.

“COVID was a curveball,” Birgen said. “Customers were ready to receive product, but it’s probably a good thing they didn’t. They may not have been around to pay us.”

According to Birgen, SavrPak is producing 1 million units per month and is scaling up to produce 15 million units per month by the end of the year. The company has a number of brands testing out its patch including Wahoo’s Fish Tacos and Kitchen United, with the latter offering SavrPak’s as a packaging add-on for brands housed in its ghost kitchens.

In addition to ramping up production, SavrPak is also developing a patch that can be dropped into products like bags of salad to help keep produce fresh. The company is also in the process of receiving compostability certification. This is a good thing, considering the incredible amount of single-use container waste being generated by the rise in take out and delivery.

SavrPak isn’t the only company tackling the issue of soggy food sucking. Packaging company Novolex makes the EcoCraft Fresh & Crispy clamshell containers that help keep food crisp through “micro-flute corrugation” built into its to-go containers.

With the pandemic still very much impacting our eating habits, off-premises isn’t going away anytime soon. That sucks for a lot of reasons, but when it comes to eating delivery at home, maybe SavrPak can make it suck less?