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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food delivery

ChefSteps Expands Further Into Food With Launch Of Pre-Cooked Meals

Back in February, I  wrote about ChefSteps’ plan to create a meat ‘marketplace’ that would connect “independent ranchers with ChefSteps users, offering them direct access to high-quality meat and ingredients at great prices.”

As it turns out, this effort was part of a larger initiative to expand into food sales that is starting to come into fuller focus. The most visible part of this foray into food sales is the company’s growing business selling meat and fish sourced from local food providers in the Seattle and Portland markets. In the Seattle market, the company offers fresh meat and fish from four local providers (three for meats, one provider of fresh fish). The kits for sale on the company’s website range in price from $79 to $239. And yes – one package, the ‘Mountain of Meat,’ includes 30 pounds of steaks. (Holy meat sweats).

And now, the company has started selling pre-cooked, frozen meals.The pre-cooked meals are sold as what ChefSteps is calling, ‘Joule On-Demand BBQ.’ The meals are all single-serve portions and range in price from $7 to $12. Unlike the fresh meat and seafood, the pre-cooked meals from ChefSteps offer local shipping as a fulfillment option.  Deliveries are fulfilled by PostMates.

The Mountain of Meat meal kit from ChefSteps

These pre-cooked meals appear similar to those announced by Nomiku in April. As with Nomiku’s new meal kits, the BBQ meals are intended to be prepared in a shorter amount of time than traditional sous vide, usually less than an hour.

This move into pre-cooked meals by both ChefSteps and Nomiku shows the growing effort by both companies to expand the appeal of sous video to a broader audience.  Sous vide has traditionally appealed to foodies who are willing to invest more time in preparing chef-like meals, but with pre-cooked meal offerings, the companies believe sous vide becomes more appealing to those home cooks who prioritize convenience.

Of course, pre-cooked meals aren’t the only way to make cooking with sous vide easier for the home cook. ChefSteps and Anova have both been busy launching hands-free voice interface integrations this year, and in February ChefSteps became the first cooking appliance company to launch a chatbot for cooking with their Facebook Messenger bot.

So what became of the meat marketplace teased by the company’s February job listing? According to ChefSteps CEO Chris Young, the idea was to create a nationwide marketplace for “sous vide ready ingredients during the holiday season last year in partnership with the Snake River Farms brand.” As part of the effort, they sell meats nationwide to help ChefSteps customers get, as Young put it, a “center-piece protein for their holiday meal.”

As they worked on the plan, ChefSteps realized that costs of setting up a nationwide delivery system would be too high at this time, so for now the company is content to work out the kinks while selling meat and delivering pre-cooked meals in the Seattle and Portland markets.

“We’re continuing to experiment based on the positive feedback we’re getting from our Seattle and Portland customers, and we’re very aware that we have customers across the United States,’ said Young. “We definitely want to be able to serve those customers asap, but only when we think our service will deliver the experience and value our customers expect from us.”

Make sure to subscribe to the Spoon newsletter to get it in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out the Smart Kitchen Summit, where ChefSteps CEO Chris Young and many others will speak at the first and only event about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen. 

Minor Roadblocks Stand in the Way of Personal Delivery Devices

Think about how crazy your dog gets chasing a Roomba around the living room. Multiple that chaos by several hundred and you have folks on sidewalks jumping out of the way as robots that resemble oversized canister vacuum cleaners scurry along their appointed rounds making food deliveries.

At least that’s the thinking of San Francisco City Supervisor Norman Yee. As he remarked to Government Technology, “I want to keep our sidewalks safe for people,” Yee said. “Seniors, children, people with disabilities can’t maneuver quickly” (to avoid robots).

The San Francisco area is ground zero for testing of robotics delivery agents. Marble, a venture-backed startup based in San Francisco has its robots delivering meals in the Mission District and Portero Hill for those using the Yelp Eat24 app. Starship Technologies is working with DoorDash in Redwood City while Postmates ran a test in San Francisco for one day last year. On the brink of joining the autonomous delivery mix is Dispatch, a South San Francisco startup.

The future of Personal Delivery Devices—as they are called in legal circles—is wrapped up in a battle of often conflicting interests. Restaurants look at their cost-saving potential with the ability to win loyal customers with quick, efficient delivery. For some chefs, PDDs can allow such visionaries as Anthony Strong to start virtual restaurants where home delivery replaces the need to have a physical dining establishment. In addition, using a fleet of robots can allow grocery stores and restaurants to offer delivery to suburban areas considered too costly to serve.

Early in its life cycle, autonomous delivery has met few legal challenges. San Carlos and Redwood City in California and Washington, D.C. have approved robotic delivery. Virginia and Idaho permit them at the state level, and in Wisconsin, a bill awaiting signature will permit robots to use sidewalks and crosswalks. Legislation, however, is not that straightforward with some companies using the law to keep competition at bay. For example, as a story in Recode points out, the Virginia law—drafted with the help of Starship Technologies– only permits robots under 50 pounds to be legally sanctioned; Marble’s autonomous delivery exceed that weight restriction.

While its impact can be debated, there is no debate that robots will replace workers in many sectors, including home delivery services. Given the entry level of such work, it’s likely not to be a hot button issue among labor leaders whose focus will be more on robots replacing skilled workers in manufacturing. As for robots replacing chefs—that should be a more interesting matter.

Also overlooked by many is the impact PDDs have on crowded sidewalks. As Treehugger.com puts it: “It all seems so quick and simple: design a cute little delivery AV and just let them loose onto the sidewalks. Because nobody ever asks what the pedestrians think, they don’t matter.”

“People don’t think about the negative impacts of these creative new ideas until it’s too late,” San Francisco’s Yee said. He believes for example that the Uber and Lyft cars that flood city streets cause traffic jams. “I’m trying to prevent some of the things that we did not prevent with other innovations” like ride hailing, he said.

With Investment In Nomiku, Samsung Expands Presence In The “Connected Kitchen”

Today Nomiku, maker of sous vide immersion circulators, announced their latest generation connected cooking appliance and the launch of a subscription meal service that will deliver frozen, pre-cooked meals that owners of the new Nomiku can cook in 30 minutes or less. As part of the announcement, Nomiku also announced that Samsung Ventures had invested in the company.

Food delivery marks an ambitious new direction for Nomiku, one of the original sous vide startups that has been shipping immersion circulators since 2013. By moving into subscription food delivery, Nomiku has its first business line with recurring revenue. The move also makes Nomiku one of the first companies to create a connected hardware device tied to a subscription meal service. While other companies such as Whirlpool and Barilla have been selling RFID powered cooking systems with specially designed packaged food for a couple years, and startup Tovala announced a meal subscription service tied to their cooking appliance last year, Nomiku appears to be the first to launch a meal subscription plan with intelligent auto-reordering built into the connected cooking appliance.

By offering fast-prep meals, Nomiku is also hoping to expose sous vide cooking to a wider audience. Sous vide is often seen as the domain of foodies, the types that are willing to wait longer for a cook to finish in exchange for a better tasting meal. By accelerating the cooking process, the company hopes to change the perception of sous vide circulators from a device synonymous with slow cooking to one that offers both convenience and better tasting food than other fast-cook methods such as microwave ovens.

Nomiku Pork Shoulder pre-cooked meal. Photography by Albert Law

The company plans to start small, shipping to 100 customers in May and expanding to a broader audience in the early summer time frame. The subscription food packages will be modular in nature, consisting of both “mains” and “sides” that can be mixed and matched. The average price of a meal is $15 and, after 20 or so meals, the company says it will credit the price of the Nomiku circulator ($149) towards meals.

The circulator is equipped with an RFID reader, which allows the user to scan an RFID tag on the meals and send the Nomiku circulator specific time and temperature settings for each dish. The device will also be synced with the customer’s existing food inventory and, according to Nomiku, will automatically reorder food when the meals left available are down to four.

The Samsung Connection

One of the most interesting aspects of today’s announcement is the Samsung connection. Samsung’s investment arm invested an undisclosed sum in the company, an amount that Fetterman calls “the most money any single investor has put into Nomiku”. The move marks the second investment in a precision cooking/sous vide startup by a large appliance maker in a short time period, coming just a couple months after the acquisition of Anova by Electrolux.

According to Fetterman, Samsung “is a logical partner for us because they do the connected home.” The investment in Nomiku is, according to Fetterman, a move by Samsung “to dominate the connected kitchen.”

Fetterman said Samsung plans integrate the Nomiku with their smart home platform, SmartThings. Samsung acquired SmartThings almost three years ago, and since that time has had somewhat mixed success in establishing the platform as one which other companies will commit to building around. However, the consumer electronics giant has been fairly successful in their effort to integrate SmartThings with their various product lines in the home such as appliances and TVs. While Samsung had prevously announced an integration of SmartThings with their own Wi-Fi ovens, Nomiku appears to be the first small precision cooking appliance integrated with the SmartThings smart home platform.

Fetterman also told The Spoon that Samsung plans to launch a Nomiku app for the Family Hub refrigerator. The app will come preloaded with the Family Hub and will control the Nomiku device directly from the fridge. Fetterman also believes existing Family Hub models will see in-field software updates that will install the Nomiku app on the connected fridge.

It will be interesting to see where Samsung takes this investment/partnership. I am sure they will be watching Nomiku’s efforts to enter food delivery closely since that business represents a new potential revenue stream for the company. The South Korean consumer electronics conglomerate displayed an early and aggressive embrace of the smart TV market and the associated revenue streams tied to apps included on these new devices. With their investment in Nomiku and the growth of the connected kitchen, one has to wonder if they possibly see food delivery as an enticing new service model in an era of ever-declining hardware margins.

To see Lisa Fetterman and other leaders talk about the future of the connected kitchen, come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Get your tickets today.

Newcomers Try to Innovate and Deliver on the Lucrative Baby-Food Market

Baby food is big business. While it might not be an industry ripe for innovation, several startups feel they have the magic formula to grab marketshare and mindshare.

One of the latest to enter the fray is Little Spoon, a San Francisco baby food manufacturer and delivery company in its early “invite” stage.  The company believes it can provide our little ones with healthier meals offered with great convenience. According to Statista, the baby food market in the United States has more than seven billion in annual sales. To date, a few newcomers such as Caer (now Yumi) and Gather have tried and failed, or been forced to rebrand.

The biggest challenge to break into the baby food market is competing with giants, such as Gerber, as well as a growing number of organic brands. Many new baby food meal kit ventures, even with offering delivery, have yet to successfully crack the baby food market.

Little Spoon co-founder Michelle Muller does have a new angle which she believes will give her company a real shot at success. Little Spoon uses a technology known as HPP (High Pressure Processing) which is a cold pasteurization process that improves shelf life, while allowing the food to retain its natural nutritional value.

“Modern parents have been forced to choose between two options when it came to feeding their children: Either they can spend hours a day cooking fresh baby food themselves or they can buy highly processed, in-store options that are filled with sugar, low in nutrition, and in many cases are older than the baby eating it,” Muller told tech publication Snapmunk.

She continued, “It is crazy to us that parents have to make the tradeoff between their baby’s nutrition and their own time and sanity. Using the latest in HPP technology, we change all this by making fresh and homemade baby food available anywhere in the nation, direct to your door, and at an affordable cost.”

Little Spoon - Organic baby food, delivered.

In most ways, the Little Spoon service is similar to other subscription meal delivery providers. Choices range from one meal per day at $4.99 per meal through a three-a-day plan at $3.99 per. Customization includes selecting a child’s preferences such as flavor and texture. The company currently is accepting customer invites, with no start date set for delivery.

Even though the landscape is riddled with failures, Little Spoon is not alone in sensing opportunity in the baby food space. Thistle already is in market with traditional meal kits but has expanded to include Thistle Baby--prepackaged baby food meal kits. The difference for this San Francisco Company is that the meals are plant based and come flash frozen to customers in California and Nevada. Also a subscription service, the meals currently cost $2.15/each or $45 per box, including free local or overnight delivery. Each box includes enough food for 21 meals or one week’s worth of food.

Similar to Little Spoon, Chicago’s Nurture Life uses a process called MAP (modified atmospheric packaging) which allows food to stay cold and fresh without freezing.  The company says it sources locally whenever possible and also emphasizes organic ingredients. Nurture Life states that it uses a team of chefs skilled in appealing and customizing meals to meet a wide variety of young diets. The subscription plans offer food for babies up through 18-year-olds. An eight-meal-a-week plan for a baby is $45, while a 14-week plan clocks in at $75.

Then there is Raised Real, a startup by Orange Chef cofounder Santiago Merea (see our interview with Merea here). Raised Real, which offers subscription meal kits with raw ingredients, has its own baby food machine called the Meal Maker that steams, blends and purees the raw ingredients into finished baby food. The Meal Maker comes complimentary with a biweekly or monthly subscription plan or can be purchased for $99. A monthly plan runs $180, or $4.50 per meal.

The Sidewalk’s Getting Crowded As Marble & Yelp Launch Starship Robot Delivery Competitor

While Amazon’s trying to figure out how to deliver Prime packages using drones, other startups are making land grabs for the sidewalk delivery market. We wrote last year about Starship, the robot delivery vehicle made from the brains of Skype co-founders, Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis. Starship was the first to start actively piloting robot delivery drivers around the streets of London; the robots were equipped with sophisticated onboard software that allowed them to autonomously navigate city streets to deliver goods door-to-door.

Now Starship has some competition in the form of a new partnership from Yelp’s food delivery service Eat24 and Marble, a startup that’s creating a “fleet of intelligent courier robots” made for urban delivery usage. Yelp Eat24 and Marble are together bringing robot food delivery to the streets of San Francisco. TechCrunch spotted the Marble vehicles earlier in the month and the duo made their official announcement late last week.

The Yelp Eat24 use of the Marble robots works the same as their normal delivery service; the company works with about 40,000 restaurants but offers delivery as an opt-in feature the restaurant can use for an additional fee. Marble effectively becomes another delivery vendor for Yelp, collecting a fee for each trip and yes – robots do accept tips.

CNET takes a look at both Starship and Marble sidewalk delivery robots.

Marble’s robots are built to be modular – these particular models are designed for quick food delivery, with a pod that can hold a bag that keeps food cold or warm. But the cargo area could also be designed to carry other goods like medicine and could even be outfitted to have an onboard oven to actively cook food as it travels.

Marble is a direct competitor to Starship and offering delivery in San Francisco is upping the game; Starship announced earlier this year that it would start delivering in Washington, D.C. via delivery partner Postmates and in Redwood City, CA using DoorDash.

Both Marble and Starship have committed to sending human “chaperones” with the sidewalk robots for their early journeys. Marble said it was in order to answer questions about the robot to interested pedestrians, but it’s probably also to gather qualitative data about how people react to the robots and what real life risks they might encounter.

It’s not a surprise that the market for food delivery in the U.S. is so hot – 2015 was the first year that Americans spent more on takeout food than they did on traditional groceries. Not only that, but millennials – the generation quickly taking over the baby boomers in size and buying power – indicate that they are more eager than most to order prepared takeout food. If companies can figure out how to reliably deliver that food without lots of overhead and outsource a lower skilled job to friendly robots, the way we get our food a decade from now will be drastically different.

Robot food delivery is probably just the beginning; as Marble’s modular build suggests, the opportunity for having other goods delivered is real and could easily be accomplished by a partnership with a healthcare system (medicine) or a retail giant like Target or Walmart. Amazon competition, anyone?

Grubhub’s Future Clouded by Big-Monied Competition

Once the darling of the restaurant-to-home delivery business, Grubhub’s TV commercial tagline “click, click, food,” may be in danger of becoming an internet relic.  With the explosive growth of well-heeled competition in this market space, there is increased skepticism from Wall Street and investors.

Despite its current lofty standing, in which the Chicago-based company works with more than eight million restaurants and serves more than 290,000 meals per day, near and present dangers loom. Stock analysts believe that, as Grubhub moves beyond its primarily urban clientele, order size and frequency will drop. As their competitors look to robotic delivery of food, Grubhub said it would be making minimal investments in its delivery infrastructure in 2017. One analyst believes being acquired is the best hope for the company.

On a more micro level, many of Grubhub’s challenges are as a result of slow reactions to dynamic market conditions in the food delivery space.

By not creating a more significant barrier to market entry, companies such as Amazon and Uber have easily invaded Grubhub’s territories. With other businesses to leverage, both companies can more easily afford to absorb losses and invest heavily in costly advancements in logistics and consumer-facing content.

Postmates and DoorDash have inked deals with Starship Technologies to experiment with robotic delivery of food. While Uber presses forward with self-driving cars, Grubub has done little to think to a more streamlined future. There has been talk of adding a chat feature to its ordering app to allow customers to communicate with restaurants. This feature could be too little, too late.

In what was pegged as an April Fools Joke, Grubhub announced a new delivery feature called Delivery X which would allow the company to bring food to out-of-the-way places by using a fleet of folks on skateboards and parkour techniques. That vision might seem funny as a hyperbole, but thinking out of the box may be just what Grubhub needs to retain marketshare.

Some of Grubhub’s problems are common to businesses that grow as a result of buyouts and acquisitions of smaller companies, attempting to bring together disparate systems and cultures. The biggest of these deals was in 2013 when Grubhub merged with New York-based food-delivery stalwart Seamless (which owns more than half of the combined company). Add to that mix such firms as Dotmenu, LA Bite, Delivered Dish, AllMenus, Menupages and more.

Focusing on major metro areas such as New York and Chicago, which account for about 75% of its orders, has allowed the company to rack up $493 million in 2016 revenue. Moving into smaller metros will require expenditures in advertising and onboarding new drivers. Drivers in the food-delivery space are a fickle bunch, with many signing on to multiple providers and sticking with the ones that offer the best deals and flexible hours (or shifts, as they are known in that industry). It will be difficult to lure drivers from Amazon and Uber given they offer multiple revenue streams in the ridesharing and package delivery areas.

Laying Grubhub to rest in the graveyard of web failures is premature. The company has a market cap in excess of $3 billion and deals with California Pizza Kitchen and Fatburger in its portfolio. The company recently added the capability for customers to use their Amazon Echo devices for voice ordering. CEO Matt Maloney was heavily criticized for an email he sent to employees attacking the newly elected president, Donald Trump, but his ability to grow the company and take it public speaks to his leadership.

Before all is said and done, many players in current restaurant delivery space will go bust or—for the lucky ones—be acquired. Grubhub is teetering on the fence at the moment and will need to do more than delivering clever April Fools jokes to survive the market maelstrom.

Cloud Kitchens: Why Some Restaurants Are Ditching Everything But The Kitchen

A restaurant with no tables, no chairs…no customers.  Sound strange? It could be the future of dining.

We’re talking about “cloud kitchens,” a new concept in restaurants–mini-kitchens that only cater to online food delivery orders.  No dine-in and no customer take-out either, just online order delivery.

A recent trend beginning to take hold in certain regions, particularly India, cloud kitchens are emerging to economically meet the growth in online food ordering.

With more people ordering online delivery, and fewer going out to eat, many restaurants in India struggle to stay above water, especially given the high costs associated with the traditional restaurant model like premium real estate and wait staff.

Several chains in India have shut down their traditional restaurants and are transitioning to cloud kitchen, or kitchen-only operations.   Because cloud kitchens do not serve customers on-premise, there are huge savings in renting in non-premium locations, and a cloud kitchen can function in just around 300 sq ft of space, much less than a restaurant that needs to accommodate dining space.

Spring Leaf Retail and TMA Hospitality Services, both fast food retailers in India, have begun converting traditional restaurants to cloud kitchens in order to cut costs and meet transitioning customer preferences.

Food aggregators are also getting involved in cloud kitchens.  In January online food aggregator Swiggy launched its first cloud kitchen, “The Bowl Company,” and in March Zomato also entered the cloud kitchen market.

Zomato’s cloud kitchen project, dubbed Zomato Infrastructure Service (ZIS), aims to help restaurant owners to start a cloud kitchen without the infrastructure cost.  Zomato will create kitchen pods, each housing up to four different mini-kitchens, which restauranteurs can then rent space in.

With Zomato providing the real estate and the equipment, the restauranteur can just walk in and start cooking.  To further cut costs, Zomato is using its data to identify recently closed restaurants from which it acquires kitchen equipment at deeply discounted prices.

Walk in, walk out, no commitments

Zomato wants to eliminate start-up barriers for restaurants.  They’ve done this by absorbing infrastructure costs and also by not locking owners into long-term commitments.  Restaurants can leave at anytime if they aren’t making money.

Zomato will charge restauranteurs a percentage of their revenue, but there will be no fixed costs associated with the service.  Restaurants will also pay a fee for additional services rendered by Zomato including order lead generation and advertising.

Shared resources

These cloud kitchen pods not only eliminate infrastructure costs and high rent, but promote shared delivery personnel to offset delivery costs.

Zomato will also offer a front where customers can select dishes from different restaurants, and have them delivered in the same order. Kind of like a virtual food court where consumers can pick from multiple restaurants, all located in one (online) location.

It was not stated whether the restaurants needed to co-exist in the same pod to be packaged in the same delivery, but it is assumed that this will be the case.

ZIS was launched in early March, with the first pilot kitchen set up in Dwarka.  This is anticipated to be the sole location initially, with plans to begin building additional kitchens mid-year based on results of the pilot.  Zomato has stated it is their goal to have 100 of these locations by year-end 2018.

Maine’s Forager the Latest to Use Tech as a Farm-to-Table Solution

Much like the zeitgeist term “Internet of Things, the use of the popular slogan “farm to table” is confusing marketing speak widely subject to personal interpretation. The farm part is fairly easy to understand, but table conjures up the image of local tomato grower driving up to your home and placing a pound of heirlooms on your kitchen counter. If only that were the case. Yes, it’s a “Portlandia” skit come to life.

In broad brush strokes, the world of farm-to-table is two businesses—tech-driven B2B logistics platforms that connect farms to retailers and restaurants, and the far-more-challenging niche world of home delivery of farm-fresh produce.

Speaking of Portland—the one in the Northeast part of the U.S.—a new enterprise called Forager is an app-based ecosystem that offers a farm-to-table solution connecting local growers to retailers, restaurants and market vendors. Forager allows commercial buyers of fresh farm goods to see what local farmers are growing and have in stock, and then place orders accordingly. Forager CEO David Stone says the system eliminates what he calls a “manual, paper intensive, error-prone process.”

“More and more people are putting local food on their plates,” Stone told a local Portland TV station. “[The farm-to-table movement] is growing really fast, but the technology hasn’t really focused on it yet.”

Stone’s goal is to make Forager a nationwide platform, but in its early days the technology is being utilized by farmers in Maine and New Hampshire. His immediate goal is to get the technology in the hands of growers throughout New England and upstate New York.

B2B farm-to-table solutions abound focusing on the part of the value chain that put fresh goods into the hands of resellers. Pointing to the glut of innovators looking at this growing part of the food tech industry, the 2017 Food + City Challenge featured such F-2-T solutions providers as Bucketload, Farm Fare, and Origintrail. There also are plenty of tech newcomers to support this new-ish-IoT supply chain. Companies such as Fresh Surety provide technology that calibrates freshness of goods as they travel from grower to marketplace.

A few daring entrepreneurs have attempted to tackle the business of delivering those farm-fresh goodies to consumers—essentially a specialized grocery delivery service. Any of the countless supermarket-to-home services will deliver a bunch of celery or a pound of oranges, but those selections hinge on the untrained eye of your average Instacart employee. For field-to-home goodness, subscription-based startups such as New York’s Farm to People and Texas-based Farmhouse Delivery have heavily curated weekly services that bring seasonal produce to your door.

Cost is the significant issue for bringing that ear of corn picked that morning directly to your kitchen. With low margins and an elusive target market, companies such as Farmhouse Delivery charge a one-time membership fee and weekly or bi-weekly service of a medium bushel (five-seven items) for $27.00 or a large bushel (nine-11 items) for $39.99. For better margins and a higher per-customer order, Farmhouse also delivers prepared foods, meat, poultry and dairy items. The target for such services is the subset of families who want to eat healthy and have the resources to buy local and organic without a weekly trip to the farmers market.

At the other end of the farm-to-retail-to-table spectrum is a potentially large and socially responsible opportunity, but one that is far less sexy. Solutions for getting fresh food to underserved “food deserts” attracts neither visionaries nor startup capital, leaving such programs as the St. Louis Metro Market, a non-profit that converts city buses into mobile farmers markets, as a placeholder for future social entrepreneurs.

Martha Stewart + Amazon Partner To Bring You Dinner Tonight

The best part about meal kits is that they take away the need to meal plan and decide what’s for dinner. Each week, a box arrives at your door and gives you 3-5 preplanned dinners with exactly the right ingredients to prepare and cook each. The worst part? The amount of planning it requires to get the kits in the first place.

The problem meal kits solve is the age old question – what’s for dinner in the future – but they don’t tackle the very common, end of the week and out of groceries question – what’s for dinner TONIGHT? If you’re like me, you have at least one night in the week where you’ve made all your meals, you haven’t grocery shopped yet, and take out just doesn’t sound appealing (or healthy). Martha Stewart (and Amazon) are here to help.

Martha Stewart partnered last year with Marley Spoon to create a branded meal kit, joining the 100+ other meal kits out there, many of them also backed by a celebrity name. But they recently announced a true stand-out feature – partnering with AmazonFresh, Stewart & Marley Spoon will now ship their meal kit the same day you order it.

According to Inc, who has the full scoop,

Users can now order a single meal for two adults in the morning, and find it on their doorsteps that evening.

The company hopes that the move will give them an edge in the meal kit market, and welcome new consumers into the fold. The typical meal kit consumer tends to be 25-44 – Marley Spoon hopes this move might appeal to older consumers as well who aren’t able to leave the home as much. It seems more likely that it will open them up to people who aren’t great at planning meals all the time – busy parents, or busy professionals in general – and want a quick, last minute solution that isn’t takeout.

The meals can be ordered in the morning and will run about $24/meal for the food and on demand service. Not cheap, but probably similar to what a restaurant-quality takeout meal would cost and with fresher, healthier ingredients.

Amazon, on the other hand, is clearly interested in all areas of food commerce – from the grocery store to fresh food delivery to meal kits, they’re putting their footprints in almost every area.

Want To Eat Like A Star Quarterback? There’s A Meal Kit For That

Tom Brady and the New England Patriots in general usually elicit one of two reactions: complete fanboy love or abject hatred. But if you’re in the love fan group or you’re just someone who wants to follow the diet plan of a superstar athlete, then meal kit delivery service Purple Carrot has a new product for you.

Called TB12 Performance Meals, a nod to the quarterback and his Patriot’s team jersey, they were designed to give consumers a super healthy, plant-based, gluten-free weekly meal plan that mimics Brady’s own regimen. According to Purple Carrot, the TB12 meals were designed around the needs of someone who requires fuel that promotes healing from intense physical workouts and fuels the body to encourage peak performance.

The TB12 philosophy is focused on preventing injury and promoting accelerated injury recovery through holistic, whole-body wellness, incorporating exercise, recovery, and hydration & nutrition concepts like those expressed in TB12 Performance Meals.

The meal kit comes with ready to prep ingredients, similar to competitive meal delivery kits like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh and Sunbasket but is higher priced at around $13 per plate or $78 for the week at only 3 meals a week. The meals are highly specialized and created to be high in protein and low in sugar, soy and processed ingredients. Purple Carrot points out in the FAQs that the TB12 meals are different from their traditional offerings, designed specifically for individuals that have a higher metabolism due to increased daily activity and are only available for 1-2 people in each box.

Brady’s diet and commitment to personal wellness are well known among fans and was chronicled in the Boston Globe extensively. Purple Carrot approached Brady last summer and the pair began to discuss the potential meal delivery partnership. They worked to identify meals that Brady regularly eats at home and on the road and crafted workable recipes that could be recreated in a meal kit.

In a statement to Fortune, Purple Carrot Founder & CEO Andy Levitt said about the opportunity, “The meal kit industry has grown significantly since I launched Purple Carrot two-and-a-half years ago. Partnerships with great organizations like Whole Foods Market, and incredible people like Tom Brady, enable us to elevate our brand even further.”

Brady isn’t the first celebrity to cash in on their personal brand and the meal kit boom – Martha Stewart partnered with the Marley Spoon to create one her own along with countless celebrity chefs like Michael Mina and Jamie Oliver. Athletes as food spokespeople is a well-known advertising tactic and it’s no surprise that companies will look to increasingly popular products like meal kits to continue that trend as the way we cook and consume food evolves.

The TB12 brand is something Brady has worked to build out with other offerings as well, partnering with Under Armour to offer apparel, creating a foundation to support elite athletes who become injured and creating a personal gym and fitness program. TB12 Performance Meals can be ordered today and boxes will start shipping on April 3rd.

The Food Delivery Boom Comes At A Price

Food delivery startups have been all the rage, dominating food tech investment for the last several years. In what has become an extremely crowded market, there are signs that the market is shifting, with companies like Square reportedly looking to sell off its food delivery business Caviar and competitors like Postmates struggling to raise more funds.

But even with the consolidation, food delivery startups have added a level of convenience to ordering takeout that consumers are now used to. But at what cost?

The New Food Economy, a non-profit publication that publishes long form pieces on the forces that are changing food as we know it, published a piece looking at the dark side of food delivery and the challenges it presents to small restaurant owners.

The business models of companies like Seamless, UberEats, Yelp Eat24 and Postmates goes like this: hungry customer goes online to order food. Instead of going to a specific restaurant’s website and ordering through their system or picking up the phone (an antiquated notion these days), they visit a food delivery website that gives them menus, pricing, online ordering and delivery options for all the area eateries. The GrubHubs of the world then turn around and charge said eateries 10-30% of each order. The lowered margins aren’t desirable, but the idea is that the increased volume from the food delivery site will make up for it.

Except that’s not always the case. Working with these services requires the business to have a tablet on site that takes orders and it can get overwhelming to track different orders from different services. And then there’s the matter of profit – when Teddy Roland, a restaurant owner profiled in the New Food Economy piece, tried to raise his delivery prices, Postmates and DoorDash refused.

“How is that different from the Mafia in the 70s saying, ‘I’m going to take 200 bucks not to break your legs?’” he says. “‘We’re going to take 20 percent of your money and you have to live with 80 percent.’ – Roland

The longer piece is worth the read. It’s not surprising that consumer appetite for more convenience comes at a price. Lower-priced clothing is made by workers making unlivable wages in deplorable conditions, cheap meat is produced by giant factory farms and quick food delivery services take profits from take out joints who are often small businesses.

Some restaurants are fighting back and using tactics to encourage customers to take the extra step and keep their money in the restaurant. Says Roland, ““I’m asking a little more out of my customers,” he says. “You want to be lazy and just use your thumbprint and GrubHub app, you’re going to pay more for it, that’s all.”

DoorDash Adds a B2B View to the On-Demand Home Delivery Market

DoorDash’s latest TV spot shows a family relaxing in their San Francisco Victorian home when they are suddenly alerted that dinner has arrived. As a micro sized red car pulls up, dad jumps out of his chair, daughter pushes over her toy tea set and Rover makes a beeline for the door. Mom answers the doorbell where she is greeted by a smiling “Dasher” who hands her the food. Dad and daughter are hanging out the window grinning as if they had won the Publishers Clearing House prize. Yes, it’s DoorDash, and the spot ends with the slogan, “Get ready to get the door.”

The finely crafted 30-second ad may inspire customers to download the DoorDash app and order up their Sunday supper. However, the company’s recent announcements indicate restaurant-to-home-delivery is only a small part of its vision.  In Dec. 2016, the company launched DoorDash Drive, a service in which a restaurant can place the delivery order and indicate its destination. Drive is part of what company executives say is a point of competitive differentiation—a focus on the backend/infrastructure.

“With DoorDash Drive, we’re building the first logistics layer for restaurants, to solve deliveries that may or may not originate on the DoorDash marketplace,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu said in a recent interview with Fast Company. “A lot of times, an off-premise order, whether it’s takeout or delivery, doesn’t necessarily happen through an app. It happens over the telephone or in person. A merchant may want to fulfill those deliveries, and so why can’t there be a way for them to do that?”

Amazon’s Prime Now restaurant delivery is poised to provide major competition to DoorDash as an infrastructure provider. Already one of the world’s largest backend providers with AWS, Prime Now offers restaurants a merchant app which can accept, cancel or refund orders. No doubt, that’s the tip of the iceberg for what Amazon can provide its clients.

As a straight-up restaurant delivery company, DoorDash is much smaller than GrubHub with far less financial resources. In fact, DoorDash’s most recent investment round in 2016 dropped its valuation to $700 million, with share prices dropping 16% between its second and third fundraising campaign. The focus on money is crucial for a company intent on earning its reputation by building a comprehensive infrastructure to handle restaurant delivery logistics. DoorDash’s theory is that if an eatery can use its Dashers to handle inbound and outbound orders, the establishment can expand its catering business.

DoorDash Drive product manager Abhay Sukumaran says his company’s aim is to build a “programmatically accessible logistics network” that becomes a platform for its customers to add its own personalization such as linking it to a CRM system. “The goal is that this infrastructure becomes something that you can build other things on top of,” he told Fast Company.

Taking on delivery for restaurants and caterers could be a good market niche for DoorDash, but it will not be without its challenges. For example, a delivery person handling a large order on behalf of a food client becomes more of a representative of the establishment. While a restaurant can set rules for its own drivers regarding appearance and customer interactions, working with virtual delivery agents cuts out such important controls.

But there are delivery agents DoorDash can control—the robotic kind. U.K.-based Starship Technologies is working with DoorDash in Redwood City, CA to test a small number of its remote-controlled robots as surrogates for humans for short-distance food delivery.

DoorDash is by no means leaving its food delivery roots behind. They already operate in 300 cities in the U.S. and the company is adding liquor delivery and small-item grocery delivery from Whole Foods to its roster. That seems like a lot of the company’s plate as it tries to ride its infrastructure vision to either an IPO or big-ticket takeover.