Beyond the horror inflicted on Ukraine by Russian forces, the universal blowback from this unprovoked attack has dealt a major blow to Russia’s food-tech business. Between the financial impact of harsh sanctions and public sentiment against anyone or anything associated with Vladimir Putin, established companies and startups in every segment of this emerging space have been hit hard.
Yandex, the company, called by some the “Google of Russia,” is the biggest name on what is becoming a sinking ship. Yandex deployed its delivery robots in many U.S. locations via its partnership with GrubHub, but Yandex has fallen on hard times since the Ukraine invasion. The University of Arizona and The Ohio State University have ceased accepting deliveries from GrubHub via its Yandex partnership. In the meantime, one of the firm’s key executives, Tigran Khudaverdyan, has been hit with personal sanctions and has left the company after his assets were frozen and his personal travel was restricted.
CNN reported that Yandex, which handles about 60% of Russia’s web traffic, along with its media business and ride-sharing divisions, is losing customers to the point where it may not be able to meet its debt payments. The company headquarters is in the Netherlands but primarily serves the Russian market and is listed on the Russian Stock Exchange.
Russian grocery-delivery giant Samokat entered the U.S. market with a bang in September 2021 with a new service called Buyk (pronounced bike), which offered 15-minute delivery using empty storefronts in New York City. In the wake of harsh sanctions which froze capital assets, the company has shut down operations and this week filed for bankruptcy.
As it turns out, Russian consumers have become major consumers of plant-based meats. Fueled by the pandemic, Vegconomist reports that 10% of Russians eat plant-based alternatives while 54% are willing to add such products to their diets. Greenwise and Welldone are two leaders in the plant-based meat industry in Russia, both of which have set their sites on the European Market and beyond. Even if the Russian market is a large one, the country’s citizens are facing economic hardships and will unlikely have money to purchase anything more than basic staples. The future of these companies must be in doubt.
According to industry tracker Traxcn, the Russian food tech scene is booming with 131 food tech startups in areas such as personal meal services, online catering, plant-based meats, restaurant reservations, and cloud-based accounting services specializing in working with restaurants. Companies such as Gettable, Welldone, and Qummy (among others) will face significant challenges attracting investors and reaching consumers beyond Russia during these troubled times.
From the U.S. perspective, major fast-food companies are taking a significant hit by leaving Russia and Ukraine, leaving their operations dark. McDonald’s, for example, gets 9% or $2 billion of its revenue from Russia and Ukraine. Pepsi and Coke are suffering similar losses (Coke 1-2% of annual revenue; Pepsi, 4% of yearly income) by leaving Russia and Ukraine.
food tech
The Digital Twin Emerges as Tool For Rapid FoodTech Product Iteration
Changing eating habits and preferences, accelerated by a pandemic, demand different product designs and SKUs. Start-up food companies are increasing their market share with innovative new products. Added up, all of this continual competition in the food space is causing pressure for brands of all sizes for the rapid iteration of food products and their processes.
A new application is emerging that helps food companies deal with all this change, something that at once tracks consumer demand and product details to provide actionable insights for brands in their operations and with their supply chain partners. This new tool is the digital twin.
IBM is one company investing in the digital twin application as software for food companies and manufacturers. From their perspective, a digital twin is a virtual model designed to accurately reflect a physical object. Informed by data, the virtual model can be used to run simulations, study performance issues and generate possible improvement scenarios, all with the goal of developing valuable insights – which can then be applied back to the original physical object.
Transparency becomes increasingly important as consumers seek healthier ingredients and knowledge of food origins. Some brands provide details on their working conditions, plans for a smaller carbon footprint, sustainable packaging design, or community benefits as reasons to purchase their products. The digital twin improves the responsiveness of food brands by gaining deeper insights via consumer- and market- feedback data from multiple sources. Organized data helps food companies reformulate recipes, formats, or product designs in response to those signals.
At BMO’s 15th annual Global Farm-to-Market conference in 2020, Mike Duffy, CEO of New Hampshire-based C&S Wholesale Grocers noted how the ongoing pandemic made it clear that technology will play a key role in efficient and flexible supply chains. Duffy added ‘it is important how you increase collaboration with all your [supply chain] partners. How do you get to better connectivity, forecasting, and faster decision-making? [There has been] a lack of visibility of products moving through the supply chain. There is a big disconnect from demand signal to production [response]. How do you shorten the cycle time to make manufacturing more responsive to shifts in consumer demand so that there isn’t obsolete or excess inventory?’. It is the goal of digital twin software to provide actionable and product-specific information responding to changing demands from consumers or supply chain partners.
Leading food companies (and rising start-ups) are building a framework with their suppliers and end-customers in an integrated response system facilitated by the digital twin. It allows them to gain the insights to produce products or modify them. For example, the digital twin can estimate modifications with IoT feedback from retail, foodservice, or digital consumer surveys. Digital threads incorporate a range of information and benchmark performance to identify potential opportunities. It simulates the impact of changing raw materials or packaging, factors that may see rising market preference. As part of the support function for the food company, the digital twin more accurately validates production with real-world supply chain and operations information.
For automation leader Siemens, the digital twin helps the food sector become more flexible to drive sustained innovation through the timely use of information. The physical and digital are integrated for continual improvement of products through process updates. Siemens’ software manages data security, protection, and privacy as required, along with transparency where regulated or expected by governments or consumers. As a long-time leader in manufacturing innovation and operations design, Siemens supports how brands respond to change. Combined with lifecycle management techniques, digital twinning accelerates ‘on-point’ production, and ensures faster responsiveness.
Siemens’ Simcenter digital twin software relies on continual feedback supporting the testing and iteration of production lines, from supply chain logistics with partners at the source, to grocery retail or foodservice. Simulations in the digital twin help validate product prototyping with internal operations tests. The cost of failure is significantly less for a virtual prototype compared to a physical, in-market version. For example, UK-based TrakRap works with Siemens digital twinning software to reduce the costs of operations modifications such as packaging. The transparency of the application builds trust across the value chain.
New companies, such as Twinthread use digital twin applications to make it easier for small and medium-sized food companies to model their factory and in turn gain insights that optimize production. Utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning, Twinthread provides rapid value via operations cost savings, such as greater energy efficiency, and quality control.
Companies such as Twinthread and Siemens are supporting a revolution in food tech with the digital twin serving as the end-to-end applied tool in both the supply chain and for product management. Digital twins are timely in their ability to quickly respond to and improve product design, one day potentially anticipating pandemic impacts, or climate-, social-, trade- and geopolitical- related implications to food product development and innovation. Digital twins are design thinking in action, placing emphasis on consumer- and market-centric innovation ecosystems which remove the silos between demand signal and production response.
We Tried Goodside Foods Meatless Crumbles Made by MycoTechnologies Mushroom Fermentation Technology
Having gone to numerous CES shows, I’ve developed a few survival strategies for the big tech conference: Bring hand sanitizer, wear comfortable shoes, and eat food whenever you get a chance.
While that last rule is mostly because food lines at CES are usually insanely long, as of late, it also applies whenever a company introduces a new plant-based food. And this year, three years after Impossible Foods debuted their second-generation plant-based burger at CES, we had a chance to try a new alt-meat in the form of Goodside Foods meatless crumbles.
Goodside Foods crumbles, a texturized pea and rice protein blend fermented by mycelia, debuted last week at CES 2022. The product is the first under MycoTechnology’s new consumer-facing brand. According to the company, Myco’s natural fermentation process makes their plant protein easier to digest and removes any off notes from plant-based meat alternatives. Interestingly, the product is packaged in a dry, shelf-stable form that is activated by water or broth. Once activated, the crumbles can be served in meat-based products such as pasta sauces or chili.
I decided to drop by the booth and give Goodsides crumbles a try. The company was serving up chili made with the new crumbles, the other usual chili fixings, and a plant-based cheese made by the company’s technology.
How’d it taste? Pretty darn good. I’ve tried both Impossible and Beyond ground beef alternatives in chili and pasta, and the Goodside Foods’ crumbles were on par with both of these products.
What I didn’t do was try the crumbles on their own in, say, a hamburger patty, so I can’t give a verdict on its standalone flavor. However, since the crumbles essentially gave me the same experience in chili as, say, a ground beef, it tells me Goodside Foods has really nailed the mouthfeel of a ground meat product (which is where many of the early plant-based meat products I’ve tasted fall down).
I also have to say, I like the idea of a dry, shelf-stable alt meat product (that isn’t, well, spam). While most plant-based meats freeze well and many – like Impossible – have pretty long refrigerator shelf-lives, the reality is sometimes we all get busy. Like others, I have forgotten to put a package of alt-meat in the freezer before it spoiled. With a shelf-stable product like Goodside’s crumbles, you can load up your pantry and not have to worry about spoilage.
If you’d like to try Goodside Food’s crumbles, you can order them online.
And, if you’re curious to try more mushroom-powered food, you may not have to wait long. The company was also showing off a mushroom milk at CES (ed note: it tastes like Oatly), which Goodside hopes to start shipping in Q1 or Q2 of this year.
You can see the chili made with Goodside’s crumbles in the video below.
Cream Cheese and Champagne Shortages? No Fear, Food Tech is Here to the Rescue
In the past few months, supply chain issues have been cited as a reason for major delays in everything from food to holidays gifts. Last week, USA Today published a piece detailing the food and beverages that are in demand for the holiday season but are experiencing shortages throughout the country. A Christmas meal without ham and a New Year’s Eve party without champagne might be a major bummer, but luckily, companies in the food technology space have alternative options for these popular commodities.
Cream Cheese
Cheesecake is a popular dessert option during the holiday season, and bagels with cream cheese are an easy breakfast option for visiting guests. However, according to the USA Today article, bagel shops throughout the country are experiencing shortages, and a cheesecake factory in New Jersey has had to cease production twice due to shortages. Mainstream brands like Philadelphia may be in low stock, but there are quite a few food tech companies that offer alternative cream cheese options. Nature’s Fynd uses fermentation and microbial proteins to create two flavors of cream cheese, while Miyoko’s Creamy uses cashews to craft several different varieties. Spero uses sunflower seeds to produce cream cheese flavors like pumpkin spice, herb, and blueberry.
Champagne
Popping bottles of bubbly is an iconic part of New Year’s Eve, but this year, you may find it more difficult to get your hands on champagne. According to Wine Enthusiast, we are at the beginning of a multi-year champagne shortage. You may want to start “dry January” early and try some alcohol-free sparkling wine options. A few companies that offer varieties of zero-proof champagne or sparkling wine are TÖST, Noughty, and Surely.
Chicken Tenders
With kids at home on holiday break, chicken tenders may be a favorite request for lunch. The price of chicken has been rising, and the meat industry has been experiencing labor shortages. If chicken is pricey or difficult to find, plant-based chicken is certainly one option. The plant-based space recently experienced a “chicken war” where companies were racing to get their alternative chicken products on the market quickly. As a result, Beyond and Impossible now offer chicken tenders and nuggets. Other companies like Daring, Rebellyous, Simulate, and Nowadays all offer plant-based chicken nuggets as well.
Cat and dog food
Our beloved furry family members are susceptible to food supply chain disruptions too. Owners have reported that it is more challenging to find certain wet food brands that they are used to buying. This could be the result of an aluminum shortage on top of delays within the supply chain. In the realm of food tech, Wild Earth offers plant-based pet food and is currently working on a cultivated meat pet food product.
Let’s Order a Pizza(bot)! Picnic Reveals Pricing, Opens Ordering For Pizza Robot
So you want to deploy a pizza robot? Seattle-based Picnic has you covered (as long as you can cover their monthly fees, that is).
And now we know what that pricing looks like because the pizza robot startup just opened up reservations for their pizza bot on their website.
Starting this week, operators who want to reserve a Picnic pizza robot can choose from two off-the-shelf configurations: “The Essential” or “The Works.” The Essential configuration is your basic pizza workhorse, a robot that can build up to 100 pies per hour with cheese, sauce, and fresh-sliced pepperoni. The Works configuration has additional toppings capability, allowing operators to add sausage, mushrooms, and onions – or whatever toppings they like – up to three total. An additional toppings module is available for The Works for an additional charge.
Both Picnic models can be configured to work with varying dough thickness (up to 2 inches max) and pizza sizes of 12″, 14″, and 16″. The operator can also customize the system to add ingredients in whatever order they prefer, and both models can be configured to have the conveyor system work left to right or right to left.
Those familiar with the Picnic robot know that the system is designed today for solely adding stuff on top of the pizza. Company CEO Clayton Wood has previously told The Spoon that while Picnic robots will someday have the capability to create the dough pies and cook the pizza, the initial focus is on the most “work-intensive” part of pizza-making: adding sauce, cheese, and toppings.
Like many food robotics startups, Picnic uses a robotics-as-a-service pricing model. Baseline pricing for the Essential configuration is $3500 a month for a three-year term, while the Works is $4500 a month for three years. Both models can be reserved with a $250 deposit.
If all that sounds good and you are looking to deploy a Picnic in your restaurant, you’d better hurry. According to Picnic, the systems are sold out for Q1 of next year, and there is extremely limited inventory left for Q2. However, things start to look better in the second half of next year, and both models are widely available for Q4.
Hyper-Robotics Launches a Robotic Pizza Restaurant-in-a-Box
Hyper-Robotics (previously called Highpper), an Israel-based maker of fully autonomous robotic restaurants, has launched its first fully automated restaurant concept, a containerized robot pizza restaurant that can pump out up to 50 pies per hour.
The restaurant, which you can see in the video below, has a whole bunch of technology packed into one box, including three convection ovens, a conveyor belt system that moves pizzas into the ovens, an automatic slicer, and a boxing system that puts freshly-made pizzas into a box to hand off to the customer to name just a few.
Some other features of Hyper’s robot restaurant:
- 30 pizza warming cabinets
- Built-in cold storage that can store up to 240 kinds of dough in different sizes
- Two robotic dispensing arms
- Dispensers for up to 12 toppings
The company’s choice of pizza for its first autonomous restaurant isn’t a surprise given the company’s CEO and cofounder: Udi Shamai, the CEO of Pizza Hut Israel. Shamai is the master franchisee for the pizza chain in Israel and operates a total of 90 Pizza Huts across the country. Shamai is also the non-executive chairman of Dragontail Systems, a company that makes computer vision and AI systems to help automate food quality assessment for clients such as Domino’s.
With the launch of its robotic pizza restaurant, Hyper-Robotics joins an increasingly crowded pizza robot space that includes the likes of Picnic, Piestro, Basil Street, Bancroft, Middleby, and Pazzi to name just a few. While the unit is the first restaurant from the company, Hyper has plans for other autonomous robots that will also serve up bowl food, burgers and even ice cream.
SKS 2021: Meet Mezli, Maker of Robotic Containerized Restaurants
Over the next couple of weeks, The Spoon is featuring interviews with leaders from the Smart Kitchen Summit 2021 Startup Showcase, and this time up we have Alex Kolchinski, the CEO of Mezli.
Mezli builds containerized robot restaurants they call auto-kitchens. The company’s fully autonomous restaurants-in-a-box offer a menu of Mediterranean grain bowls, sides, and drinks. Mezli’s version 2 auto-kitchen is complete and the company is getting ready to launch v3 publicly next year.
If you’d like to connect with Alex at the Smart Kitchen Summit, hop on over to Hopin where we are hosting our virtual event and pick up your ticket today!
Researchers Have Developed a Chameleon-Inspired Solution to Keep Fish Fresh
Red light, green light. Your first thought may be Squid Game, but these two colors are part of new food technology used for real squid.
Researchers invented a material that changes color to measure how fresh seafood is, inspired by (you guessed it) chameleons. It can save consumers from eating spoiled fish and can keep food waste out of landfills.
Why does your fish smell so fishy?
You probably are familiar with fish that smells… well, too fishy. This unpleasant odor comes from volatile gases in seafood, such as dimethylamine or ammonia. As the temperature of fish rises, its acidity changes, and ammonia is released.
Your salmon or shrimp has definitely spoiled if you can smell this gas — but ammonia can increase to dangerous levels before your nose can detect it. “Seafood easily spoils due to microbial growth that produces volatile amine gases,” said researcher Tao Chen in an interview.
A key part of seafood production is the ability to detect these volatile gases. Current standards take about four hours to find ammonia or dimethylamine in just one sample of fish.
Imagine if the commercial fishing industry had to set aside four hours for every piece of fish in their warehouse. The process would take days, and all the food would be at risk for spoiling. In reality, most fish inspections are done visually and are highly prone to error.
Here is where a team of food scientists and chemists enters the picture. New technology from Chen and his team at the Key Laboratory of Marine Materials detects when seafood has spoiled.
Chameleon skin inspired this material.
The skin of a chameleon can shift its hue to blend into different environments in just a few seconds. In a similar show of colors, the hydrogel can change its fluorescence from red to blue to green in a few minutes. These three colors allow scientists to visualize changes in response to stimuli.
The hydrogel changes color as heat and ammonia levels rise. The technology is easy to use, as the hydrogel can be placed directly into any package to check if fish or shellfish are safe to eat. Though customers should not eat the gel, it will not affect the product’s taste.
The soft material is unique in its ability to change colors. Both chemists and material engineers have struggled to design a synthetic fabric that could change colors. Until this study, scientists have been unable to model the structure of panther chameleon skin in a lab.
“Is it possible to mimic this unique structure into artificial color-changing materials? As described in our paper, the answer is yes,” Chen said.
“Up to now, the responsive color-changing capacity of synthetic materials was still far inferior to that of the natural chameleon skin,” researcher Patrick Théato said in an interview. Théato collaborated with the team in China for this bio-inspired project.
Science: Taste the rainbow.
The team discovered that the secret was in the separation. Instead of placing all fluorescent materials onto one sheet, each color has its own layer.
As seen in the diagram below, at the core of the hydrogel is a red layer that stays true to its hue. A middle blue layer measures the temperature of the seafood, and an outer green layer tests acidity and ammonia levels.
The blue hydrogel layer changes color from purplish red to blue when the temperature rises. At 20º Celsius, the material appears to be purple or red, and when the heat rises to 50º Celsius, the hydrogel turns blue. The whole hydrogel turns green when ammonia is present and has no color change if ammonia is not present in the sample.
Not only do the different layers mimic the skin of a chameleon, but they also let scientists test the environmental variables on their own. Existing methods combine heat and ammonia into one reading and are less accurate. For example, current technologies would likely miss a slight change in acidity if the temperature stayed static.
Almost one-third of food in China is wasted.
Chen spoke to his personal motivation to create seafood-focused technology. His team hails from Ningbo, a coastal metropolis in China. “Many people in this city love seafood very much,” Chen said.
However, a significant amount of this catch ends up in landfills. A new study shows that 27% of all food in China is wasted per year. To put that number in perspective, food waste emissions in China are equal to total emissions in the United Kingdom.
How is the country keeping food out of the garbage? Well, President Xi Jinping declared war on food waste last year. As of April 2020, it is illegal to order too much food at a restaurant. ‘Mukbang‘ videos are similarly discouraged and were removed from many social media sites.
Another potential solution? The hydrogel. It can help reduce food waste on an industrial level. Commercial fisheries can use the gel for faster and more accurate readings and take immediate action if some of their seafood is beginning to spoil.
Color in cephalopods.
Théato, Chen, and many of their collaborators are working on a new project inspired by a different type of animal: Cephalopods.
These ocean dwellers – cuttlefish and squids, to name a few – are masters of camouflage. They can change their color faster than a chameleon. The researchers are creating a fluorescent hydrogel that takes notes from octopuses.
The team’s original hydrogel looked to acidity or temperature as the catalyst for color change. The new version has an electric stimulus, which is easier to control and free from any chemicals. It is currently under development for larger-scale applications.
Seems that octopuses are teaching us, after all.
Ten Chili’s Restaurants Are Now Using a Server Robot Named Rita
Want your baby back ribs brought to your table via robot?
You may be in luck as Rita the robot, a version of the Bear Robotics Servi server robot platform, has now been deployed in 10 Chili’s restaurants across the US.
The news, shared via a social media post on Linkedin, marks the latest in a string of deployments for the Bear Robotics robot over the past year. The northern California-based company has seen wins across the US in 2021, from Florida’s Sergio’s to the Country Biscuit in North Carolina to Sangam Chettinad Indian Cuisine Restaurant in Austin.
But with over 1600 locations, Chili’s is the biggest win yet for Bear Robotics, and one which looks like it’s growing quickly. Bear announced they deployed Rita to a fifth Chili’s just a week ago, and since then, new locations have been added almost daily.
The Chili’s server-bot deployment is also likely one that could signal a bigger turn towards robotics in fast-casual restaurants. Other chains are no doubt watching the rollout of Rita closely and could be planning to trial their own front-of-house bots as many continue to struggle with hiring.
Bear Robotics, founded by ex-Googler and restauranteur John Ha, has come a long way since Ha started trialing his first robot, Penny, in his own restaurant, the Kang Nam Tofu House in Milpitas, CA. A couple of years later, Bear debuted its second-generation robot Servi, and the company’s been serving up new deployments ever since.
“[Servers] are tired, they get a low salary, usually no health insurance, but they’re working really hard,” Ha told The Spoon in 2018.
In the same interview, Ha also told The Spoon he wanted to create the “Google of the restaurant field.”. With Bear’s relationship with one of the country’s biggest restaurant chains, he may just be inching closer to that vision.
Here Are All The Food Tech Innovators We’ve Spotted in David Chang’s New Hulu Show
There may be no one with more culinary street cred in America today than David Chang. Not only has the New York-based chef won multiple James Beard awards and seen his restaurant Momofuku called the country’s most important restaurant, but Chang himself is widely recognized as an astute observer of the food world who always has his finger on the pulse of the country’s culinary zeitgeist.
And what’s on Chang’s mind these days is a whole lot of food tech, at least if his new series on Hulu, The Next Thing You Eat, is any indication. While the six-episode series isn’t available until October 21st, we do have the video preview, which features shots of everything from food delivery bots to lab-grown meat to indoor robotic farms, so we thought it would be fun to play a game of ‘guess who’ and see how many people and companies we can recognize from the food tech revolution. Below is a list those we spotted in the video. Watch it yourself and see if you can identify the ones we could identify and help us ID those we couldn’t.
Wild Type and its cell-based salmon: Chang talks about how climate issues will impact our food and we soon see Wild Type’s Justin Kolbeck saying, “we’ve come up with salmon without using animals” as Chang and others taste the company’s lab-grown fish.
Upside Foods: As we watch a meatball simmer in a pan, Chang states “we’re going to be eating lab-grown meat.” We then cut to a scene in which he turns to Upside Foods’ VP of product and regulation Eric Schulze and asks, “you could just recreate a geoduck?”. Schulze calmly responds, “you could go even further back and do its ancestor, the dinosaur.”
Serve, the delivery robot: While Chang doesn’t say anything specifically about robotics in the two minute video preview, we do get to see him jump in surprise as Serve Robotics sidewalk delivery bot, rolls up behind him.
Miso Robotics: We see Flippy the robot doing its thing, and then we see Miso’s Buck Jordan saying to Chang, “it can look at a piece of meat, it can know how hot that portion of the grill is. Perfect grilling, every time.” Chang responds that this technology is at least 5-7 years out, to which Jordan replies, “Oh no. We are installing into steakhouses this year.”
Jordan is probably referring to the machine vision technology that pairs with and helps direct Flippy’s robotic arm. While we’re not aware of Flippy currently being used in a steakhouse, it’s not a stretch for a robot that got its start flipping beef patties at Caliburger to move a higher grade of beef.
Impossible Burger: During the course of the video, we see a few shots of juicy alt-meat products, including an Impossible Burger. How do we know it’s an Impossible Burger? Because immediately afterward we have a shot of Danny Preston, owner of Malibu’s Burgers (which serves Impossible products), says, “it’s designed to make the meat eater say…” as Chang bites into a burger and exclaims “Oh God.”
There are a few mysteries in the video such as the children’s cereal as well as a robotic vertical farm, but there’s not enough visual info (for me at least) to confirm the companies behind them. If you can help us identify these or any other food tech innovators we missed, please let us know in the comments.
Either way, the mystery will soon be solved as Chang’s series drops on Hulu on October 21st.
The Week in Food Tech Funding: Perfect Day’s Big Raise & Gorillas Quits Monkeying Around
The week’s big news is a $350 million Series D raise by precision fermentation unicorn Perfect Day. There’s a whole lot packed into this announcement, so let’s get right to it:
First, the funding raises Perfect Day’s total to $750 million and sets the company on track for a possible IPO. The timing couldn’t be better, as tech startups continue to see rising valuations and the market is hungry for more food tech (see Oatly). And while Ginkgo Bioworks was the first company with significant precision fermentation (PF) capabilities to IPO, Perfect Day will be the first true future food PF pure-play to go public.
As part of the news, the company announced an expansion of its consumer products company, the Urgent Company (TUC). TUC, Perfect Day’s wholly-owned CPG company behind the Brave Robot ice cream brand, will add new “household staples” to its portfolio with Modern Kitchen, the second consumer brand under the TUC umbrella. Modern Kitchen’s first product will be dairy-free cream cheese, which the company will make with its animal-identical whey. As part of the announcement, TUC revealed Brave Robot is now in 5 thousand stores and that they’ve moved a million pints of ice cream.
Speaking of Brave Robot, it always struck me as a risky choice for a product name. Sure it stands out, but Brave Robot also doesn’t exactly make one think of tasty ice cream, which I think is the biggest challenge for a product that also wants to somehow communicate to the consumer it is made differently from traditional ice cream. With Modern Kitchen, I have to wonder if Perfect Day went purposefully conservative, choosing a brand this time around that doesn’t create extra work for itself.
Perfect Day also announced their third line of business (the other two being ingredient innovation and consumer products) in enterprise biology scale-up services. This move is a formalization of its enterprise biology efforts that started with the company’s 2020 acquisition of bioprocess scale-up facility SBF. With its new business line, Perfect Day hopes to help other food companies with technology transfer and scale-up consulting services.
“We first got into the ingredient business because food companies, big and small, were eager to work with the ingredients we had successfully scaled,” said Perumal Gandhi, Perfect Day co-founder, in the news release. “Today, something analogous is happening on the technology side. There are innovators all over the world with ideas and ambitions similar to our animal-free milk protein, but need help getting there. We’re standing up business models to be able to share our demonstrated capabilities in a way that maximizes upsides for all, yet ensures that Perfect Day remains at the forefront of our new industry.”
What struck me about the series of announcements is they illustrate how Perfect Day has matured in both its business and how it talks about itself. The addition of business services not only adds a new revenue line to the company, but it is a strategically savvy move that will set Perfect Day up with a pipeline of long-term IP licensing and ingredient supplier opportunities.
On the company messaging front, it wasn’t all that long ago that Perfect Day struggled to describe its technology and the animal-free dairy products that resulted from it. That’s changed, however, as this announcement brims with confidence. The company has clearly figured out how to communicate the benefits of its product while also giving just the right touch of details around the technology behind it all.
And now, the rest of this week’s funding news:
Cultured Meat
New Age Meats – $25 Million: California-based New Age Meats has raised a $25 million series A to help fund product development and ramp up production of its pork sausage products. Founded in 2018, the company hopes to bring its products to market next year as it uses the funds to double its workforce and build a first pilot production plant.
Ghost Kitchens/Virtual Restaurants
All Day Kitchens – $65 Million: Ghost kitchen startup All Day Kitchens announced this last week they’ve raised a $65 million series D to expand its distributed network of satellite kitchens. The company, which launched in 2018, focuses on helping small independent restaurants expand their reach via a unique model; Unlike traditional ghost kitchens with often treat restaurants like a landlord, All Day Kitchens helps to launch its new restaurant partners across its entire network of kitchens in a given metro area.
Plant-Based
Ripple – $60 Million: Pea-protein alt-dairy specialist Ripple has raised a $60 million Series E. Ripple, which basically is to pea milk what Oatly is to oat dairy products, has continued to grow its products ever since its 2015 debut and plans to use the funding to expand into even more new products and markets. While not all pea-protein products from Ripple have succeeded – see our review of the pretty-bad and now discontinued Ripple yogurt here – I’m intrigued to see what new products they bring to market (well, of course, except maybe yogurt).
Food Delivery
Avo – $45 Million: Israel-based food delivery startup has raised a $45 million Series B. Avo, which offers white-label food and consumer products delivery to landlords and employers, says it plans to use the funding to expand into 10 new metro markets over the next year. From the release: Avo’s mission is to deliver everything from groceries and alcohol to electronics and personal care items to millions of people daily. The company’s customizable amenity platform enables residential and commercial customers to obtain everyday items, the same day, without any minimum order size or incurring any delivery fees of any kind. The platform also excludes a tipping fee, as Avo has a full-time salaried team. Stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, Avo is currently adding a new major market every month – a dramatic increase in growth that has helped drive revenue 1000% over the past two years.
HUNGRY – $21 Million: Chef-powered catering delivery company HUNGRY has raised a $21 million Series C from a mix of athletes, reality TV talent show singers, and the usual mix of corporate venture capital funds. The company, which lets companies cater food from chefs, works with a variety of high-profile chefs such as Tom Colicchi and has claimed it allows chefs to earn up to half a million per year on the HUNGRY platform.
Swiggy – Half a $Bil?: Indian food delivery startup Swiggy is reportedly in talks to raise a $500-$600 million funding round that would value the company at one Oatly ($10 billion). Invesco will likely lead, while others like Softbank will also throw in capital.
10 Minutes Grocery Delivery
Gorillas – $950 Million: Gorillas, the fast-growing, fast-grocery delivery business has raised an eye-popping $950 billion in funding. The news comes even as the company has reportedly decided to stop monkeying around with a US expansion, at least for the time being. According to Business Insider Germany, Gorillas has decided to scale back its US expansion plans outside of New York City and is laying off employees beyond the Big Apple. This funding comes in large part from Delivery Hero as Gorillas continues expansion in as Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and France.
Plant-Based Fish
Hooked – €3.8 Million: Sweden’s Hooked has raised €3.8 Million for its plant-based fish products. Like many new alt-protein funding rounds nowadays, Hooked’s with news of a celebrity backer, Swedish music star Danny Saucedo. The company launched its plant-based tuna brand Toonish into retail last month in the Swedish market.
Food Robots
Piestro – $4.7 Million: Piestro, a maker of robotic pizza-making kiosks, has raised just under $4.7 million via equity crowdfunding. The campaign, which the Wavemaker Labs portfolio company ran using StartEngine, will be used to fund the second-generation Piestro, which will be the first pizza robot from the company to be deployed in consumer-facing locations and take payments. The company hopes to have its new prototype deployed by December of this year. Wavemaker Labs, which describes itself as a “robotics and automation corporate innovation studio”, has shown a preference for using platforms such as StartEngine and SeedInvest to raise funds with its portfolio companies like Piestro, Miso Robotics, Future Acres and Bobacino.
Food Tech Patent Watch: Patent Reveals Eatsa’s Robotic Meal-Assembly Machine
Remember Eatsa?
You know, the automat-like bowl food restaurant that was re-spun as a fast-growing (but more boring) restaurant marketing tech company called Brightloom?
I do, mainly because I loved the place. After I visited one in New York City, I wrote that the restaurant could be the future of fast-casual dining.
As it turns out, some – including maybe Eatsa’s investors – didn’t agree with me. I say that because starting in 2019, they phased out the cubbies, changed their name, took money from Starbucks, and, from the looks of it, dropped big plans for automating the back of house with meal assembly robots.
I say that because Eatsa (now Brightloom) holding company Keenwawa, Inc. was issued a patent last month for a meal-making robot. The patent, a continuation patent for one first issued to the company in 2019, shows a system that assembles meals by dispensing different ingredients stored in canisters into bowls and then shuttles the assembled meals off to the cubbies in the front of house.
From the patent:
The automatic food preparation and serving apparatus may also comprise the food dispensing mechanism configured to dispense the ingredient from the plurality of food canisters into the bowl or food receptacle, under program control of the one or more processors.
The patent goes into excruciating detail about the system, complete with dozens of images outlining the canisters, the dispensing system, the conveyor belt, the bowls, and even the touchscreen user interface (which looks a lot like those deployed in the actual Eatsa restaurants for consumers to choose their bowls).
The list of inventors on the 60-page plus patent includes the former automation and engineering team for Eatsa, as well as Dave Friedberg, the one-time Climate Corp founder who incubated the company as part of what would eventually become The Production Board holding company.
I have to wonder if Eatsa-now-Brightloom’s owners are looking to license or sell the technology or even revive their ‘eatsa-inside’ strategy. After all, the recent news that Sweetgreen had acquired Spyce to help do exactly what Eatsa did – make food bowls – shows that some restaurants see a future in automated meal assembly.
Time will tell. For now, however, you can take a look back at the Eatsa ordering and cubby system below.
Food Tech Patent News Roundup
The First Patent Awarded to an AI System is in Food
While I thought that artificial intelligence systems will do most everything at some point, I assumed an AI being awarded a patent was one we could sleep on for a few years more.
I was wrong. In the July edition of the Patent Journal, an AI system named DABUS was awarded a patent for an innovation called “food container based on fractal geometry” for a system with interlocking food containers.
This Quartz Africa article describes DABUS’s creator:
DABUS (which stands for “device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience”) is an AI system created by Stephen Thaler, a pioneer in the field of AI and programming. The system simulates human brainstorming and creates new inventions. DABUS is a particular type of AI, often referred to as “creativity machines” because they are capable of independent and complex functioning. This differs from everyday AI like Siri, the “voice” of Apple’s iPhones.
DABUS’s inventor Thaler submitted the patent application listing DABUS as the inventor since the AI conceived and created the food storage system entirely. He submitted it to patent offices worldwide, including the US, which rejected him because, among other reasons, the US patent office only awards patents (for the time being) to human inventors. However, the South Africa patent office apparently had no such restrictions when it surprised many with an award of a patent.
In retrospect, it shouldn’t be that surprising AI are creating patentable ideas. AIs already write novels and movie scripts, so why not invent novel things like food containers and get them patented?
I’m looking forward to when we see AI start innovating on novel food. We’ve seen what an impact AI had in vaccine development, so it’s not too much of a stretch to see how it could start making a difference on the bioengineering front for foods.
A Patent Awarded for Many Container Within Container Scenarios For Food Storage, Cooking, and More
A fairly wide-ranging patent titled “Multi-function compact appliance and methods for a food or item in a container with a container storage technology” (US011104502) has been awarded to an Edward Espinosa from Spain for a system that enables a variety of container within container use-cases.
One example is a food container within a larger food storage appliance (i.e., a fridge) sending information on status such as freshness, etc. Another is the refrigerator with a microwave oven in one of the compartments.
The patent describes various technologies such as NFC, Bluetooth, voice control, machine vision via an internal camera, and more to enable the container systems to communicate with the appliance. In addition, the system describes the use of smart tags that communicate freshness data from within storage drawers.
I’ve long called for innovations in the core design of the fridge since they’ve largely been the same for the past 100 years, and it looks like Espinosa has definitely given the refrigerator a rethink.
Whirlpool’s Solid State Cooking Patent
It’s been a loosely held secret in the appliance industry that Whirlpool has been tinkering around in the solid-state cooking area for a while. This patent describing a system with multi-regional cooking via RF signals shows they are also trying to accumulate IP in the market. At this time, only Miele has commercialized a consumer solid-state cooking appliance, but hopefully, soon, we’ll see a next-generation microwave from a mass-market brand like Whirlpool.