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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food storage

Spoiled Opportunities: How Tupperware Could Have Reinvented Itself Before It Was Too Late

In recent weeks, news reports about the struggles of the housewares brand Tupperware have surfaced.

It’s unfortunate to see such a storied brand on the brink of bankruptcy, but it raises the question: was this avoidable? Could Tupperware have saved itself by embracing new ideas to modernize its brand and products?

We’ll never know for certain, but a household name like Tupperware might have had a chance if it had explored new products and business models a little sooner. Here are a few ideas of how the company could have reinvented itself:

DTC Housewares Rollup

Tupperware could have transitioned to a direct-to-consumer (DTC) model sooner, either natively or through acquisition. Although Tupperware products are available for purchase on its website, the company still largely relies on its direct sales model, which is based on the party plan concept. While some companies can still make this model work (like Thermomix), the Tupperware Party is a relic of the past that does not resonate with modern consumers.

One approach the company could have considered is a brand rollup strategy, similar to what we have seen from Pattern Brands. Pattern has been gradually acquiring successful DTC brands like GIR, Yield, Poketo, and Onsen. Each brand already had its own loyal following, and Pattern was able to achieve operational scale by consolidating back-office, marketing, and distribution. Tupperware could have also considered larger deals with successful social media-driven brands like Caraway.

Focus on Eco-conscious and Toxin-free Housewares

Tupperware is primarily associated with its plastic storage containers for fridges and freezers. Although the company has diversified into other materials, it has not made a name for itself in eco-friendly products. While some silicone-based products can be found on their website, it is surprising that Tupperware did not embrace this popular material, known for its heat resistance and toxin-free properties. The company could have developed Stasher-like bags and sets of GIR-like kitchenware.

Smart Food Storage and Management

As Spoon readers may know, the current state of home food storage has not embraced technology to address a significant issue: food waste. While startups like Silo, Uvera, and Ovie have attempted to rethink home food storage by incorporating smart technology, they are all still in various stages of development. Tupperware did experiment with crowdsourcing ideas for new container approaches a few years ago, but it seems nothing ever materialized from that effort.

If Tupperware had developed a smart storage platform that leveraged connectivity standards and smart home technologies like Alexa and HomeKit, it might have gained traction. Although the company’s home ambassador model is not ideal, a high-end storage “system” like a smart food container product could have benefited from hands-on sales.

Additionally, Tupperware could have created a food storage management app for use with either conventional food storage or a smart storage system. The company could have also collaborated with established appliance brands like Samsung to integrate a smart food management system into their devices.

These are just a few ideas for how Tupperware could have avoided its current fate. While the brand might survive, either by navigating a restructuring or through the sale of its name and assets to a buyer (who, let’s hope, would not turn it into a Zombie-brand like Polaroid), one can’t help but wonder what might have been if the company had embraced one or two ambitious ideas for reinventing itself before it was too late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EverCase Demo Video

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

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

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

After Getting Derailed by COVID, Smart Food Container Startup Silo Attempts a Come Back

Back in late March of 2020, Silo CEO Tal Lapidot had a decision to make. The dark clouds of a global pandemic had gathered overhead, threatening to derail his company’s progress on finishing a product he’d been working years to deliver.

The product, called the Silo food storage system, was a new take on a stale category where most everyone used the same plastic containers their parents had used before them. The Silo featured lots of cool bells and whistles, including a built-in scale, Alexa integration, and spoilage notifications. The big idea, though, was a vacuum seal system that promised to extend shelf-life of food by up two to three times.

It turned out that lots of people liked the idea of a better food storage system and the company was flying high when it ran a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2018 that raised over $1.4 million. I was one of them, becoming backer #2531 after I plunked down $219 for the ‘enhanced basic’ reward package that included the Silo base and four containers. The promised ship date was April 2019, but after having backed a few hardware projects before this one, I knew ship dates were less hard promises than loose guidelines.

Lapidot and his team had been regularly posting updates on the progress of the company on Kickstarter, and the backers were, for the most part, both understanding and encouraging. With COVID-19 infections spreading and a whole lot of uncertainty about the virus, Lapidot felt he had no choice but to send his workers home. He posted an update on Kickstarter letting everyone know about the situation:

We hope this update finds you well, and you and your loved ones are staying safe. Since our last update, the world has changed in terrible ways. Unfortunately, this has significant implications for all businesses, including ours.

Silo recently had to pause all operations as the whole team is under stay-at-home orders, which, unfortunately, also caused the delay in sending this update. As a hardware startup, we have tried at first working from home, but this has proven to be highly inefficient as we cannot make actual progress without our team having access to our office lab and equipment.

Mothballing the project meant bringing his team back from China, where the company had been working with a contract manufacturer preparing to build the product. They’d already invested in the tooling for the product manufacturing run, one of the most expensive parts of building a hardware product.

“The idea was, once COVID subsided a bit, we would restore the operations, ” Lapidot told me in a phone interview. “But as you know, that took longer than expected.”

A couple of years longer than expected. While a big part of it was due to an inability to work on the product both in their office in Israel and on-site in China, an even bigger issue was the company soon ran out of funding. Although they’d managed to raise an impressive amount of money with their Kickstarter, the cost of engineering a product and manufacturing systems for over 5 thousand backers would cost much more than $1.4 million. Lapidot had expected this and managed to find investors for the company, but once COVID hit, one of them got cold feet.

“When COVID erupted globally, I got a phone call saying ‘hey, listen, we’re not going to transfer the funds’,” Lapidot said.

From there, with a furloughed team, stalled operations in China and a lack of funds to get things going, Silo entered a period of stasis as Lapidot just tried to keep the lights and preserve the company’s assets while he searched for new funding.

“The situation sort of stagnated, and we tried to figure out how we can get back on track.”

Two years on, things are finally starting to look up. The company has found a new investor to help fund the production run for the product, and now Lapidot is working to get the company back to where they were in the spring of 2020 when the world shut down. A big part of that is trying to reassemble a team and ramp up engineering and technical talent.

“We basically just send everyone home one day, and so there was no organized process of preserving the knowledge,” Lapidot said. “So we have everything, and now we’re trying to get to where we were.”

Other challenges include a lingering lack of critical components due to COVID-related supply chain disruptions. And then there are the continuing travel restrictions to China as the country tries to tamp down a new wave of COVID infections.

“We cannot travel to China because it’s 21 quarantine days just to enter, and it’s not very simple even to get that approval,” Lapidot said. “So it’s going to be a bit more challenging because we have to work more remotely instead of being there.”

According to Lapidot, the company has enough funding for an 18-month runway for the company, and his focus is on getting the first units of the product built. He has started building an engineering team and has reestablished ongoing contact with the manufacturers.

The biggest challenge, according to Lapidot, will be securing the critical components they need to build the final prototypes. They need those to finish debugging the system to prepare for manufacturing, after which they plan to send out factory-made units later this year.

In the meantime, Lapidot knows that the early goodwill he had among backers has evaporated as his updates have gone silent since last July as he has tried to figure out how to get the company back on its feet. Like many stalled Kickstarter projects, most of the messages from backers nowadays are less words of encouragement and more of the “what happened to my money?” variety.

Lapidot told me he plans to apologize to the backers and that he will be transparent about where things are in an upcoming update.

“I know people got hurt from the situation and I feel horrible. We didn’t want this situation. I’ve been a backer on the Kickstarter community for a while. Being in the doghouse after you have seen it from the other side, it’s not an easy experience.”

CES 2022: Uvera’s Smart Food Storage Uses UVC Light To Kill Bacteria

If you’re like me, no matter how hard you try, you end up throwing out food.

And while I recognize most of that waste is on me – a huge part of reducing food waste, after all, is being more mindful about how much is made and remembering to eat what’s already been purchased – I am also pretty convinced that better food storage technology could help me better manage and reduce food waste.

This is why I was intrigued to see the Uvera home food storage system at CES. The Uvera smart food storage system is similar to the Silo system in that it has a base unit that will vacuum seal containers to extend the life of food stored in the device. However, what sets the Uvera apart is its use of UVC light.

Why UVC light?

According to Uvera CEO Asrar Damdam, UVC kills bacteria, which helps extend shelf life and make food after.

“UVC light creates a sterilized environment,” Damram said. “It destroys viruses and bacteria such as COVID-19, salmonella, E.coli, and H1N1. So UVC light alone can extend shelf life of food, but now we’re combining vacuuming as well to increase shelf life even further.”

According to Damdam, the company will begin offering the Uvera food storage appliance via a crowdfunding campaign in March of 2022. Let’s hope the company has better luck than the Silo, which is over two years late and hasn’t updated its Kickstarter backers since July.

You can see Damdam explain the Uvera smart food storage system in the video below.

CES 2022: A Look at the Uvera Home Food Storage System

Fighting Consumer Food Waste at Home Means Rethinking the Refrigerator

What’s the most effective way to fight food waste in the home? Take a look at your fridge.

Most consumers at this point are aware of the world’s multibillion food waste problem. A great many more now understand that, at least in North America and Europe, the bulk of that waste happens at consumer-facing stages of the food journey, including our own homes. What we’re less certain of is how to curb that excess.

Researching solutions for “The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report,” which you can read on Spoon Plus, I came across a number of different methods for reducing food waste in the home. But after sifting through the many storage and preservation options out there, the meal-planning and meal-sharing apps, I’m left wondering if the trick to reducing at-home food waste isn’t just re-envisioning the refrigerator itself.

The appliance hasn’t changed much over the last several decades. But in 2020, the pandemic is keeping more folks at home, we have more information about how much food we’re actually wasting (it’s a ton), and more investment in the food tech sector in general. The convergence of those factors makes now an ideal time to change that point and introduce more innovation into the world of refrigerators. Here are a few ideas:

Smarter Features That Are Actually Affordable

By now, many consumers are at least aware of high-tech refrigerators that can track items placed in the fridge, alert owners when those items are running low, and scan and identify foods to help consumers plan meals and find recipes. LG’s ThinQ and the Samsung Family Hub are two appliances that lead the smart fridge market.

They also cost thousands of dollars, making them out of reach for most consumers. True, having cameras and image-recognition technology inside the fridge is a relatively new concept, so a higher price point is to be expected. But in order for the new applications of those technologies to be most effective, they’ll need to get cheaper. By that I mean, we’ll need to see options for them build into most fridges.

Another option is add-on tech for the fridge. As we note in the report, Smarter makes a device can be retrofitted for any fridge and recognize the items inside. Fridge Eye has a similar device.

Smaller Fridge, Bigger Freezer

“Everyone loses something in the back of the fridge,” food waste expert Dana Gunders told us when interviewed for the report. Her point is that the sheer size of most modern refrigerators means older items will get pushed out of view and forgotten as newer ones are placed in the fridge.

High-tech fixes like the ones mentioned above can help, but the fridge design itself seems ripe for an upgrade. Or downgrade, as it were, since a smaller fridge compartment with a bigger freezer might be a surefire way to reduce food waste. Much of our food, even items like milk and bread, can be frozen until we need to use them. And research shows that things like frozen fruits and vegetables maintain more or less the same nutrients as their fresh counterparts. 

Better Storage to Accompany the Fridge

Back in the 1930s, when the electric refrigerator was just starting to get popular, General Electric sold fridges by promoting the then-newish concept of leftovers to consumers. Along with tips and cookbooks, the appliance-maker sold food storage containers designed to stack up in the fridge and hold leftovers. 

Maybe to curb food waste, we need a kind of rebirth of that concept, this time geared towards curbing food waste and with a high-tech twist. Major appliance manufacturers could team up with startups like Mimica, BlakBear, or Silo to sell smarter storage options — think smart labels and temperature sensors — alongside their appliances. They could also find ways to integrate some of those new technologies into fridge doors, drawers, and other compartments.

For more thoughts on the reinvention of the refrigerator as well as how else we can fight food waste at home, check out the full “Consumer Food Waste Innovation” report at Spoon Plus.

This Startup Is Making A Food Container That Detects How Much Time is Left Before Your Food Spoils

What if food labels could tell you in real time if your food has gone bad?

That’s the vision of a UK-based startup that has developed a set of smart food labels to determine food freshness. The labels do this via an embedded sensor that detects the ammonia levels being produced by the food.

As described by packaging trade publication Packaging World, the smart labeling developed by BlakBear has “two electrodes printed on it as well as an embedded RFID chip.” As food spoils, ammonia is released and the gas is “absorbed into the paper’s cellulose fibers and then dissociates into ions. The electrodes sense and measure the ionic conductivity present in the layer of water that is already naturally present in the paper’s fibers to determine the shelf life of the product.”

Most of us can detect food spoilage by smelling the ammonia emitted as food decomposes, but by the time that happens, it’s usually too late to save the item. According to one of the company’s founders, BlakBear’s sensors are up to 100 times more sensitive than the human nose when it comes to detecting spoilage.

Smart labeling that can detect food freshness is not new. I wrote about a group of researchers from China’s Nanjing University and the University of Texas at Austin in 2018 that were developing a similar technology that would detect biogenic amines (BAs) and communicate spoilage using an embedded NFC chip.

Amazon has also been looking at technology that could detect food spoilage. Back in 2017, I wrote about a patent the company had filed for similar technology that could go into refrigerators and detect the gas emitted as food decomposed.

BlakBear is also interested in bringing this type of technology into the home, only instead of building into an appliance, they are working on a smart food container. The company is creating a system called HoneyBox that incorporates the freshness sensor and then communicates with an app via Bluetooth. The device will send reminders and act as a countdown clock on long the food will be edible.

While BlakBear isn’t saying when the product will be into market, the company is currently evaluating consumer attitudes around potential features and pricing for HoneyBox.

And from the looks of it, HoneyBox isn’t the only product the company has in the works. According to BlakBear’s CEO Max Grell, the company is also working on another bear-themed piece of hardware called BearCub that they are trialing with retailers. BearCub, according to Grell, would also be available to use in consumer homes.

Hopefully, both will be available soon, as I think there’s a huge opportunity for better food management systems that can help us reduce food waste. I’ve long wondered why home food storage has been stuck in time and why the incumbents don’t bring those cheap plastic containers into the future (not that they aren’t trying). Sure, there’s been some small progress by some startups (I’m still waiting for my Silo), but not nearly as much as there should be.

CES 2019: The O2N2 is a Nitrogen-Rich Storage Solution to Extend Food Freshness

CES is massive, but it’s sheer size means that there are all kinds of delightful products hiding in the nooks and crannies of the convention center(s).

South Korea’s Hanyang University has a row of small booths showing off device prototypes based on research conducted at the school. One such device was the O2N2, a combination system of plastic food and beverage storage containers and what is essentially a nitrogren gas filter/pump.

The O2N2 removes oxygen from the plastic containers and replaces it with a nitrogren-rich environment. The science gets pretty complex, but the university developed a special membrane that filters out the oxygen and can create adjustable nitrogen levels inside the container. The result, O2N2 researchers told me, was that the nitrogen environments can keep food and beverages like wine fresher for longer periods of time. Here’s a chart they provided outlining their results:

chart provided by Hanyang University showing increased freshness from using the O2N2

Removing oxygen from food storage containers isn’t new. Silo vacuum pumps the air out of its storage boxes, and wine preservers like Syphon and Coravin inject argon gas into bottles to make wine last longer. So it seems like the O2N2 system could do much the same. Plus, you have the added benefit of re-useable containers and less waste.

And in a very floor wax & dessert topping kind of way, the O2N2 can also serve as a health-related tool for people who need oxygen-rich environments. Check out the video below for a deeper explanation of the technology.

There weren’t any pricing details, and who knows if O2N2 will ever actually make it to store shelves, but I’m glad I discovered more about how some researchers are thinking about food storage.

EatBy Tries Tackling Our Food Waste Problem With An App

We’ve all had that moment – we look in the fridge, and there sitting at the bottom of the vegetable crisper lies a rotted pepper, a wholly overripe avocado and some furry grapes. Into the trash it goes. It’s not a particularly proud moment – between the guilt of throwing away food that was once perfectly edible and the act of basically placing money right in the trash, it’s pretty awful.

And then there’s the larger picture: close to a third of food produced in the world goes into the garbage, totaling almost 1.3 billion tons. In the U.S. alone, we waste $689 billion worth of food every year. It’s both an individual problem and a global one – and when we talk about food tech and smart kitchen innovation, one would hope that somewhere in all of it will be some actual solutions to stop or at least significantly curb food waste.

Enter the EatBy smartphone app. At first glance, it seemed like just a fancy database of all the food you had in your house and required manual input which seemed tedious. And when it first launched a few years ago, that’s pretty much all there was. Users complained about the clunkiness of the interface and lack of features. But a recent update to both iOS and Android versions have some interesting additions that might make this app a useful tool in the fight against food waste.

The real utility of this app starts if you bring it to the grocery store. It lets you scan in items as you shop – and yes, that means it relies on a database that constantly needs updating. But through increased user inputs, it’s gotten better. You can also create grocery lists with the app which would be even more compelling if the app had an Amazon Echo skill for Alexa…which, it doesn’t. But if I scan as I go – or using my cell phone’s voice interface, telling it what I’m buying as I go, it will take that information and figure out when I need to use all of the items I’ve bought. And not only will EatBy remind me when things need to be used by, but with the recent update, it will also suggest recipes based on the ingredients I have in my fridge and based on what needs to be used first.

This feature alone is incredibly helpful because produce and meats go bad at different rates when left to sit at the same temperature, but who can keep track of that? Maybe the spaghetti squash and pork-based meat sauce should be cooked first before the chicken kebabs because the chicken will stay fresh longer and so will the peppers and onions. That type of data could help change the way consumers cook during the week and result in less sad, rotten food in the garbage before the next trip to the store.

EatBy used to be free and supported by advertising with an upgradable no-ads version, but it’s now only available as a paid app, for $2.99. But the future of food storage, usage and ultimately waste prevention doesn’t lie in a smartphone app, I’m afraid. The systems in which we purchase, store and cook our food have to fundamentally shift to give us a more holistic picture of what’s in our fridge and pantry and how to use them without requiring so much user input. But for folks who don’t want to wait for technology to enable a lazier, less proactive approach to food waste, the EatBy app offers a solution.